Ex-Goldman Banker Confirms “Profits Above Principles” With 100%-Plus Business Loans

Confirming every Wall Street stereotype that “ethics are all well and good, but money is more important,” the ex-Goldman Sachs banker who wrote a book on whether the bank always put “profits above principles” has started a firm charging extremely high rates of interest (above 100% in some cases) for struggling small businesses… oh the irony.

 

As Bloomberg reports,

Steven Mandis was working on a book about whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) put profit above principles when he hit upon a new way to make money.

 

The former Goldman Sachs banker decided two years ago to get into lending money to struggling small businesses, a niche on Wall Street where brokers offer loans with interest rates that can climb past 100 percent to dentists with bad credit and pizzeria owners behind on their bills. To some, it’s the new face of subprime.

Doing god’s work?

“If I’m going to do something, I want to focus on a really big problem so it would mean something,” Mandis said. “And small businesses, I mean, this is the heart of everything.”

Small-business lending has yet to recover from the financial crisis. Loans of less than $1 million are down 22 percent from 2007 because of tighter lending standards, Federal Reserve research shows. Even as banks have pulled back from funding businesses directly, Wall Street investors funneled at least $1.7 billion in financing over the past two years to the high-rate lenders rushing in to fill the gap, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Investors seeing a chance to profit from the risky loans include Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global Management LLC, early Facebook Inc. backer Accel Partners and Doug Naidus, a former head of mortgages at Deutsche Bank AG, whose World Business Lenders LLC charges as much as 125 percent.

…

“This is like a payday loan for a business,” said Pat Fossett, a bankruptcy lawyer in Corpus Christi, Texas, making a comparison to costly cash advances for workers. “Unless they’re making a large profit to pay that high interest, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”