Jan 2010 Vanity Fair article on Goldman Sachs

[scandal 951]

Great article on Goldman Sachs

Follow the link for the full article, it's too long to post here.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/feature...?printable=true

A couple of selections:

What Goldman doesn’t get is that all the murk about the ways it has benefited from public money taps into a deep fear that has long existed among those who think they know Goldman all too well. It’s a fear that, as one person puts it, Goldman’s “skill set” is “walking between the raindrops over and over again and getting away with it.” It is a fear that Goldman has the game rigged, even if no one can ever prove how, not just because of its political connections but also because of its immense size and power. And it is a belief that despite all the happy talk about clients and culture (and, boy, is there a lot of that) the Goldman of today cares about one thing and one thing only: making money for itself. Says one high-level Wall Street executive, “Why do you have a business? Because you have a customer. You have to make an appropriate profit. But is it possible that Goldman has changed from a firm that had customers to a company that is just smart as sh!t and makes a shitload of money?”

.....

In fairness, one of the reasons Goldman is making so much money is that, while its remaining competitors huddled in their bunkers, Goldman got back to work. “The Goldman Sachs team deserves great credit to go through what they went through and get back on their feet and make money,” says an observer.

But because so many of Goldman’s competitors were gone or disabled, spreads—the difference between the price at which you sell and buy a variety of securities—were wider than they had been in years, meaning that Goldman could practically mint money. By acting at the moment it did, with Lehman out and Merrill Lynch down for the count, the government enabled this situation. “The U.S. government unwittingly created an oligopoly in most markets, and, for Goldman, a near monopoly in some,” Scaramucci says. “They tied down Rockefeller and Gates, but they unwittingly unleashed Goldman!”