They really are awful. And we continue to reward them.

The Goldman crowd was certainly cosmopolitan. Blankfein dropped a Latin phrase (Goldman had a “de minimis” business in direct home loan mortgages) and French peppered Senate Exhibit No. 62, from the petite, handsome Fabrice Tourre, the S.E.C. target who called himself “the fabulous Fab” in a 2007 e-mail.

“More and more leverage in the system, l’edifice entier risqué de s’effondrer a tout moment. ... Seul survivant potentiel,” gushed the highflying Frenchman charged with creating subprime mortgage investment deals intended to fail. That translates loosely to: the cheese stands alone. 

Continuing to talk about himself in the third person, he wrote, “Standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities!!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this. ...”

In an e-mail to his girlfriend, he called his “Frankenstein” creation “a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,” which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’ ” 

In another e-mail to her, he blithely joked that he was selling toxic bonds “to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport.” At least the Fabulous Fab had the good manners to cloak his feelings of fabulousness in front of the committee and put on an earnest mask. Luckily for Goldman, greed may trump ethics. The firm’s stock closed higher Tuesday. ...Maureen Dowd