Goldman Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden Campaign

In this July 2, 2008 file photo, a bank owned home is seen for sale in Sacramento, Calif..
AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.

Donald Mullen Jr., as first noted by the Washington Free Beacon, gave $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in August. Mullen was a key architect of the “Big Short” scheme that allowed Goldman Sachs to profit from the housing collapse.

New York Magazine detailed the scheme:

In the years leading up to the financial crisis, a team of mortgage executives and traders at Goldman Sachs predicted that the housing market was in trouble. So they designed a massive bet against it, using a bunch of esoteric financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations that would pay off in the event that housing prices fell and homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. [Emphasis added]

That bet, now known colloquially as “the big short,” allowed Goldman and its clients (including hedge-fund managers like John Paulson) to avoid losses and make billions of dollars when the housing market collapsed, at the same time that people around the country lost their homes to foreclosure. [Emphasis added]

Meanwhile, millions of America’s working and middle class lost their homes, as Business Insider reported in 2018:

After the real estate bubble burst in 2008, many families living in the US found that the cost of running their homes was no longer affordable, resulting in many of those people losing their homes. [Emphasis added]

The widespread consequences were that, between 2006 and 2014, nearly 10 million homeowners in America saw the foreclosure sale of their own homes, which entailed having to give up their property to lenders or selling it as quickly as possible via an emergency sale, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. [Emphasis added]

Livelihoods were threatened and the financial damage was colossal — not to mention the emotional damage suffered by victims of the crisis — a 2014 study shows a correlation between the crisis and an increased suicide rate. But where are the victims of the real estate and financial crisis now? [Emphasis added]

It’s not just Mullen Jr. who is showering Biden with campaign cash to defeat President Trump on November 3. Biden has taken nearly 200 contributions from employees at Goldman Sachs — including contributions of nearly $50,000 to $55,000 from the bank’s top executives.

Altogether, a recent CNBC analysis revealed, Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle and CNN has noted that “all the big banks” are backing Biden and Harris against Trump.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

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