Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s gold-plated bank, appears to be sporting an even more precious commodity these days — Teflon.
It is coming in handy as Goldman’s reputation continues to be assaulted, its shares have lost all their gains over the past 12 months and the Department of Justice is said to be getting a criminal probe up to speed.
But CEO Lloyd Blankfein is still smiling.
The CEO’s executive team, including financial chief David Viniar and President Gary Cohn, sources tell The Post, have been privately telling shareholders and clients recently that the firm has “nearly zero” chance of being charged criminally.
The Teflon-infused confidence expressed in many private conversations was echoed publicly yesterday by Sanford Bernstein bank analyst Brad Hintz, who suggested Goldman is “too big” to prosecute.
Filing criminal charges against the 147-year-old bank, Hintz wrote in a report, risks sparking a market-wide panic that would “set off another flight to quality” similar to what gripped the markets during the heart of the 2008 financial crisis.
Goldman finds itself under siege less than a year after shelling out $550 million to settle civil charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that it defrauded investors.
More recently, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) referred a scathing 650-page report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to Justice recommending that Goldman be charged criminally for its role in mortgage crisis.
Goldman is also assailed by probes from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Meanwhile, Goldman’s shares have taken a beating, declining 13.5 percent since Levin’s report. Some large shareholders are heading toward the exits. One, Wellington Management, trimmed its Goldman stake by about 40 percent as of March 31 while boosting its stake in rival JPMorgan Chase by 16 percent.
To be sure, other shareholders are upping their bets on Goldman.
Some on Wall Street are taking issue with Hintz’s “too big to prosecute” theory.
“If there’s good reason for there to be a criminal indictment, it seems to me that no one escapes — not Goldman or any of the banks,” said Marshall Front, chairman at investment firm Front Barnett Associates, who owns Goldman debt. mark.decambre@nypost.com