Goldman Sachs Made $55.7 million on Build America Bond Fees

Remember how the latest Jobs bill had yet another bail out for Goldman Sachs? How Senator Chuck Grassley was digging around on those Build American bond underwriting fees? Well Goldman Sach responded to Senator Chuck Grassley and made $54 million in fees from selling Build America Bonds, 1/3 to municipalities, and then an additional $1.7 million on adviser fees.

Bloomberg has more:

Goldman charges a fee of between 0.6 percent and 0.875 percent of the borrowed amount of money to underwrite Build America Bonds, compared with 0.875 percent for investment-grade corporate bonds and 0.5 percent to 0.625 percent for tax-exempt municipal securities, Blankfein said. Michael DuVally, a spokesman for New York-based Goldman Sachs, declined to comment further.

The bank earned a total of $149.7 million underwriting and advising on the sale of municipal securities, including Build America Bonds, since the beginning of last year, according to information it provided Grassley’s office. It generated $885 million in revenue from underwriting all types of debt in the final nine months of 2009, or 2.5 percent of the firm’s $35.75 billion in total net revenue in the April through December period, according to company filings.

President Barack Obama last month proposed extending and expanding the program, which expires at the end of this year. There have been $84 billion of the securities sold since last April, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Goldman Sachs, which paid back the bailout last year, was the top underwriter as of Dec. 31 for debt issued under the stimulus program, followed by banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Plc, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters. Goldman Sachs led a group selling $2.6 billion of securities for Georgia’s Municipal Electric Authority this month.

Chuck Grassley is going after it, in terms of Wall Street getting even more taxpayer dollars on the premise of Stimulus. Here is his series of follow up questions to Goldman Sachs.

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