Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs has been making tidal-sized waves in the blogosphere for the past week.
That’s unsurprising given that it begins with the following unnerving paragraph:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. 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.
It then goes on to accuse GS of helping to inflate no less than four asset bubbles — 1920s equities, internet stocks, mortgages and oil — with their alumni permeating regulatory and federal halls of power to turn America into one “giant pump and dump scam”.
Unsurprisingly, Goldman was none too pleased with the coverage.
Here for instance, is GS spokesman Lucas van Praag, refuting some of the claims via Felix Salmon earlier this week:
. . . 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. . . .
Now, Taibbi has shot back. You can read his full response here, but he’s essentially refuting the claim that his article was biased and that Goldman was not given the chance to tell its side of the story. From a journalistic point of view, we find the following section from Taibbi’s retort particularly interesting:
. . . Actually I did contact Goldman and gave the bank every opportunity to respond to the factual issues in the article [by sending them a list of questions]. I’m bringing this up because their decision not to comment on any of those questions was actually pretty interesting. . . . I intentionally put a lot of yes/no questions on that list. If the underlying thinking behind any of those questions was faulty, it would have been easy enough for them to say so and to educate us as to the truth. Instead, here is the response that we got:
“Your questions are couched in such a way that presupposes the conclusions and suggests the people you spoke with have an agenda or do not fully understand the issues.”
You have to have swallowed half a lifetime of carefully-worded p.r. statements to see the message written between the lines here. That this is a non-denial denial is obvious, but what’s more notable here is that they didn’t stop with just a flat “no comment,” which they easily could have done. No, they had to go a little further than that and — and this is pure Goldman, just outstanding stuff — make it clear that both I and my sources are simply not as smart as they are and don’t understand what we’re talking about. So the rough translation here is, “No comment, but if you were as smart as us, you wouldn’t be asking these questions.” . . .
Ouch.
Related links:
Goldman and AIG, redux - FT Alphaville
Goldman creates orphans and other conspiracies - FT Alphaville
