For Goldman Sachs, this year has been a PR nightmare. For the merchant bank, it's as if the financial crisis never happened. After paying back billions of dollars in taxpayer funded bailout money, it paid annual bonuses that rivaled the record payouts it made in 2007, at the height of the bubble. It set aside about $16.7 billion for compensation. Translated, that $700,000 for each of its 31,700 employees. All this at a time when unemployment is soaring and households around America are struggling to stay afloat.

Combine that with the widely read Rolling Stones piece that Goldman Sachs orchestrated every major market manipulation and you can see why public resentment of Goldman Sachs is rising.

So it's not surprising to read reports that people at Goldman Sachs are stocking up on guns to protect them from the public. All of that at a time when one in four American children is on food stamps, something I covered here.

Actually, this is all a bit of an over-reaction. There is no evidence of the proles setting up their guillotines outside the Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York.

But then, that might be a matter of time. Especially when you read Bethany McLean's profile of Goldman Sachs in Vanity Fair when the boss Lloyd Blankfein says: "I’m charged with managing and preserving the franchise for the good of shareholders, and while I don’t want to sound highfalutin, it is also for the good of America,” he says. “I’m up-front about that. I think a strong Goldman Sachs is good for the country."

So far, a strong Goldman Sachs has done nothing for the US convulsing in the worst recession since the Great Depression and unlikely to emerge for some time. Blankfein is completely delusional. Indeed, America is in the mess now because of greed perpetrated by outfits like Goldman Sachs. And until that's fixed, it will stay there.