The Settlement between the SEC and Goldman Sachs of July 2010 and the Following Misplaced Proposal of Imposing a Fiduciary Duty on Broker-Dealers

This work is primarily focused on the settlement between the SEC and Goldman Sachs of July 2010 related to the structuring and marketing of a Collateralised Debt Obligation (CDO) known as Abacus 2007-AC1. A thorough discussion of this case leads to analyze the idea of a imposing a fiduciary duty on broker-dealers. This work explains why this proposal should be disregarded. Finally, it is given a glance to recent cases similar to the one between the SEC and Goldman Sachs