Goldman Sachs: "Engineering Every Major Market Manipulation Since The Great Depression"

Matt Taibbi, the controversial Rolling Stone investigative columnist who has been stalking Goldman Sachs, et al, to unearth the deep dark secrets as well as the alchemists of the current credit crisis, boldly alleges that Goldman Sachs has been "engineering every major market manipulation since the Great Depression." The article covers a lot of ground, and while it may be difficult to agree with all of it, there are some glaring and enlightening confirmations that a good deal of it is plausible. For certain, this Rolling Stone article will make for great weekend reading.

Felix Salmon: Matt Taibbi’s 12-page screed on Goldman Sachs has appeared on newsstands... Suffice to say that in the second sentence of the piece Taibbi describes Goldman as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”; later on, he calls it “the planet-eating Death Star of political influence”. He’s also a dab hand at the pen-portrait:

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 nighmare about being forced to fly coach.

Taibbi makes the case that it’s not just wheat futures which have been overrun by index speculation, but commodities in general and oil in particular. Indeed, Taibbi puts Goldman, Zelig-like, at the center of no fewer than four speculative bubbles: one in the 1920s in which Goldman-controlled entities ended up losing an astonishing $475 billion in today’s dollars; the tech bubble; the housing bubble; and the oil-price bubble ending in 2008. He calls the US “a gangster state, running on gangster economics”, and is very explicit about exactly who he thinks the gangsters are. (Clue: they paid just $14 million in tax on $2 billion in 2008 profits.)

To view the whole article, click here.

Hat tip: Zero Hedge

Source: Felix Salmon, Reuters, June 24, 2009 - Matt Taibbi vs. Goldman Sachs