Hard to go past Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone where he accuses it of engineering every market manipulation since the Great Depression.
Taibbi doesn't pull any punches either. He calls it the "Wall Street bubble mafia". He writes: "If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain – an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
"They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s – and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet."
He talks about how Goldman honchos infiltrated the US Government. Names include former Bush treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Bill Clinton's former treasury secretary Robert Rubin who spent 26 years at Goldman ("Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach.")
And when Paulson announced the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Taibbi reminds us how Goldman Sachs converted from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allowed it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole other publicly backed funding, including lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve.
Some of this stuff is over the top but it's a good read. My only issue with the piece is that it ignores many of the villians who created the meltdown. Moderation is not Taibbi's strong point but hey, it reads well.
And the Empire has struck back. Reuters blogger Felix Salmon has a response from Goldman Sachs flack Lucas van Praag attacking the piece. "Taibbi's article is a compilation of just about every conspiracy theory ever dreamed up about Goldman Sachs, but what real substance is there to support the theories? We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance of being a force for good."
Bailout 2008, a poem by David Jeffrey:
Like a bloodied warrior,
laying broken and torn.
Like a dying soldier, hopeless and forlorn.
But the blood, it be green,
the color of money.
And the soldier is an economy,
and it is anything but funny.
Broken are it’s people and shattered are their dreams.
Thanks to the ultra rich and their full proof schemes.
It is a tragedy with more pain to come.
Finance will be Hell, and their wills will be done.