http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There’s a good story here, and it’s not just Matt Taibi’s reporting in Rolling Stone on the machinations of Goldman Sachs. It’s their non-denial denials of his facts and analysis, and the growing chorus of voices its courtiers are raising denigrating Matt’s work while using the same non-denial denials.

Matt is Goldman’s worst nightmare, that is, after losing the ear of the president, his principal economic adviser and his treasury secretary (and the Goldman alum, Robert Rubin, who is godfather to both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner). He’s a journalist who doesn’t have to trade in his professionalism for "access" or to please his editor or keep his job. Goldman’s other big worry is that more people might start listening to him, which might pull back the curtain on its wizardry.

In his Rolling Stone piece, on-line yesterday, Matt refers to Goldman as Wall Street’s "Bubble Mafia". Instead of selling "protection", running numbers or prostitutes, he claims that Goldman manufactures bubbles, sells investments in them to clients, then sells what it’s sold them "short". That’s an admission that what Goldman sold isn’t worth the price paid, and that Goldman can make more money by betting the price will go down.

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.

It’s the process that helps Goldman pay for its bonuses, which now average $700,000. After having slipped its massive losses in December 2008 into a one-month accounting and tax period separate from the rest of 2008, its 2009 bonuses promise to be the biggest in the firm’s history.

Read the whole thing.

The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything.

Matt’s is not "gutter journalism", but old-fashioned muckraking, the kind that journalist Ida Tarbell pioneered in her 1904 expose of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which helped convince Teddy Roosevelt to do something about another firm that was too big to fail. (And that was before the world’s navies all used oil instead of coal, before cars and trucks were ubiquitous and before synthetic petrochemicals were commonplace.)

After having spent over a trillion of taxpayer dollars to bail out financial firms the government claims were too big to fail (or to regulate), I’d say it’s something we need more of. Thanks, Matt.