Interesting squabble raging on between Goldman Sachs’ chief spokesman, Lucas van Praag, and Dean Starkman, a former Wall Street Journal hack, who now writes for and runs The Audit, a critique of financial journalism which is part of the Columbia Journalism Review.
Starkman has recently written written posts denouncing the “secrecy” surrounding the government bailout of AIG – secrecy that, among other things, he says, “has led news organisations to publish wildly different accounts of the degree to which, if at all, the bailout benefited Goldman Sachs.”
One post, “Goldman’s Backdoor Bailout,” highlighted a Sept. 29 Bloomberg story, saying it “blows away any inference that Goldman had no stake in the bailout,” an inference, he says, “made, interestingly, in a second Bloomberg story by different authors that actually ran after the first, on Oct 21″.
In another post, Starkman also pursued glaring discrepancies between reports by Bloomberg and The New York Times on the question of the extent of Goldman’s exposure to AIG at the time of its first bailout, and cited reporting that described Goldman’s “extraordinary efforts” to make good on its AIG investment as evidence of its keen interest in the insurer’s fate.
Not surprisingly, Goldman’s van Praag, took issue with Starkman’s take and has responded in a letter to Starkman, asserting that at the time of the AIG bailout, Goldman’s exposure to AIG was “immaterial”.
Anyway, if you’re looking for some light entertainment and an instructive example of charting your way through the morass of conflicting media reports surrounding the AIG bailout, you could do worse than have a glance at their exchange.
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