Dangerous & Lazy

Matt Taibbi has a great article in Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs. The piece concerns the ways in which Goldman has profitted from various speculative bubbles that have wiped out other investors. What I particularly like is the way he brings out the intertwined influence of Goldman’s market power and its political power, the companies ability to set the rules both economically and politically.

Regrettably, though, Taibbi has followed up the article by endorsing a range of much less incisive criticisms of Goldman, from the silly claim that Goldman’s faster computers amount to illegal market manipulation, to some ludicrous bullshit from Zero Hedge, who see a totally standard disclaimer on Goldman’s website as evidence of a plan to defraud their customers. The problem with these supposed criticisms of Goldman is that they basically amount to apologetics for the company; in comparison to the vast systemic scale of Goldman’s actual crimes, such petty crimes can only appear as inoccence.