… and the company she keeps as a director of Goldman Sachs:

1.)

Raj Rajaratnam, the founder and head of the hedge fund, Galleon Group, is suspected of being tipped off about the Buffett investment by Goldman director, Rajat Gupta.

2.)

Now that Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta is under investigation for passing inside information to Galleon’s Raj Rajaratnam, we might as well get to the bottom of what happened with Goldman board member Stephen Friedman during his tenure on the board of the New York Fed.

Basically what happened is that Friedman suddenly more than doubled his personal stake in Goldman in the middle of the financial crisis.

As chair of the New York Fed, Friedman wasn’t supposed to sit on Goldman’s board OR own Goldman stock, but Tim Geithner gave him a waiver to do both.

And now the question is… Did Friedman have some special inside information about the Buffett deal or Goldman Sachs’ financial strength that wasn’t in the public realm?

3.)

I dunno. Coming up. University Diaries will cover the story of the next one as soon as it breaks.

Oh. And of course there’s this:

Goldman Sachs’s CEO and other top officers are accused in a pair of shareholder lawsuits of lax oversight in deals involving risky mortage-backed securities that later went bad.

The lawsuits filed Thursday in New York State Supreme Court name Lloyd Blankfein and the firm’s entire board of directors as defendants.

The suits follow civil fraud charges filed last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the same investments.

The SEC says Goldman committed fraud by failing to disclose important information about the securities that might have scared off investors.

The two suits, filed by shareholders Robert Rosinek and Morton Spiegel, accuse Blankfein and other officers of “systematic failure” over 3 1/2 years for not properly vetting 23 mortgage-linked deals at the center of the SEC suit. Those deals, called Abacus, led to $1 billion in losses.

Brown University’s president resigns from Goldman Sachs at the end of this year I think. I don’t know the exact date. And I don’t know if that means she’ll be included in this and no doubt other lawsuits against the firm.

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Simon Johnson offers a larger view of the world historical events of which Brown University is a part:

[Goldman Sachs head Lloyd] Blankfein is starting to sound – and act – a lot like Nicolas Biddle, head of the Second Bank of the United States (by far the most powerful commercial bank of the day), during his confrontation with President Andrew Jackson in the early 1830s.

When Jackson first challenged the Second Bank, many people thought his concerns about the bank’s powers were excessive. But then Biddle started to fight back, spending money freely to buy congressional affection (and even leading orators) and attempting to contract credit in order to demonstrate that Jackson was hurting America.

At that point, people understood that Jackson was essentially right. The Second Bank had become so powerful that it could challenge elected executive authority and, if Biddle won, the consequences for democracy would be dire.

We are now in the phase when the most dangerous of our banks – and the people behind them – will go to any lengths to distort the realities and completely mislead people. The only way to deal with this is to do what Andrew Jackson would have done – attack, in no uncertain terms, misrepresentation wherever we find it.

… We should now view Goldman Sachs and our other five megabanks in the same terms that Andrew Jackson’s secretary used for the Second Bank of the United States, “Independently of its misdeeds, the mere power, – the bare existence of such a power – is a thing irreconcilable with the nature and spirit of our institutions.”