![Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic#
3#
in which one corporation is so powerful and all-
encompassing that it controls all of society
without the people even noticing, while
simultaneously taking their money. Taibbi says
that while we can’t change this because we are
too little, we should at least know what Goldman
is doing.#
Fact Checking!
As aforementioned, the large majority of
Taibbi’s beautiful theories and brutal accusations
are founded on flawed data. It is far from my
intention to claim that everything Taibbi says in
the article is to be discredited: his most general
points remain (I will evaluate them in the next
section). At the same time, however, I firmly
believe that using false information to back up a
point—regardless of how good or true a point
could possibly me—is never legitimate and is
not to be accepted. For this
reason, I will go over each of
the article’s inaccuracies
individually in the following
paragraphs and explain the
extent of their falsity or one-
sidedness as thoroughly as
possible. #
The first accusation I intend to review is Taibbi’s
claim that Goldman Sachs was “the chief
underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most
powerful corporations”# during the tech boom.
All this indictment does is reveal how little
Taibbi knows—or wants the reader to know—
about finance. Let me be more specific: first,
Taibbi downplays the true complexity of IPOs,
as he neglects to acknowledge how they require
the joint efforts of several banks (usually no less
than 50), each of which is technically an
underwriter to the company; and second, he
forgets to point out that regardless of Goldman
efforts and resources, the bank never reached the
top of the IPO market, which was always
dominated by Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley
(Moore). Just look at the numbers: even in 1999,
the year of Goldman’s peak competitiveness, the
bank was still making 20% less than leading
institution, Morgan Stanley (50 billion
underwritten by GS versus 62 billion by its
competitor) (Moore). Taibbi made two mistakes
in the same sentence: it is nonsensical to claim
that Goldman was the underwriter of America’s#
“wealthiest and most powerful corporations”#
because every bank in the country was; and it is
false to say it was the “chief underwriter”#as the
IPO market data clearly shows it wasn’t. #
A little different is Taibbi’s evaluation of
Goldman’s “laddering”#and “spinning” practices.
Here it is definitely possible to blame the bank,
but blaming ONLY Goldman Sachs undoubtedly
fails to portray the big picture. Although it is
unfeasible to determine which bank was the
father of these illegal practices, there exists
plenty of evidence in support of the theory that
basically every major bank on Wall Street had
adopted them during the
boom (Moore). Listing the
several fines and settlement
fees Goldman was required
to pay at some point or
another after the bubble
burst, Taibbi singles out the
bank, purposely inducing the
reader to believe that the
“squid”#was the only bad guy on Wall Street. I
can concede: Goldman was indeed a bad guy, but
certainly not the only one. The 2001 lawsuits
filed against Goldman that Taibbi cited were, in
fact, simultaneously filed to a total of 355 other
large and small banks in the U.S., and they all
were fined post-investigation (Moore).
Moreover, none of these banks ended up paying
more than what they had gained from illegally
running Wall Street (Moore).#
But the article’s inaccuracies don’t end here.
Talking about how Goldman began underwriting
subprime mortgages to profit from their high
interest rates, Taibbi explains that nobody
cognizant of the packages’# contents would ever
buy them and that the bank’s only option was to
deceive the clients by selling the subprime issues
to “[people] who [didn’t] know what they
[were].”#Although it is true that rating agencies
The'large'majority'of'
Taibbi’s'beautiful'
theories'and'brutal'
accusations'are'founded'
on'flawed'data.#](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ae11de2c-2c0b-40b6-aa42-ccf1b818eb81-150709141155-lva1-app6891/85/WP3-LINKEDIN-3-320.jpg)
![Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic#
4#
were rating these packages as AAA investments,
the interest rates were way too high to constitute
risk-free venture opportunities—nobody gifts
money. So while I can believe that thousands of
Americans not familiar with the world of finance
were fooled by the promise of enormous returns
on secure investments,
it’s not convincing that
the largest investors in
the country would also
fall into this trap
(McArdle). What’s more
likely is that investors
deliberately decided to
play the game to squeeze
out as much profit as possible before the bubble
popped (McArdle). AIG’s biggest mistake was
not putting its money inside the watermelon; its
biggest mistake was leaving it in for too long. #
Claiming that Goldman committed securities
fraud is false as well, since the bank's practice of
shorting (betting against) its own investments is
not illegal—arguably not even unethical.
Goldman and AIG, in fact, had the same amount
of information available, and if the “squid”#
managed to realize that the bundles it had been
trading were too risky, so could have (and should
have) AIG. You can’t sue someone simply
because he’s playing smart—you can, but you
shouldn’t expect to win.#
Finally, the section in which Taibbi makes his
boldest claims is the one in which he analyzes—
or better, interprets—the process that led the
government to bail out Goldman Sachs with
taxpayers’# money while letting Lehman
Brothers, Goldman’s main competitor, go under
without moving a finger. Taibbi supports the
theory that just a couple days prior to AIG’s
collapse, CEO of Goldman Lloyd Blankfein,
called former Goldman CEO turned U.S.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson asking
for a bailout in sight of the huge losses the
investment bank was to face as a result of AIG’s
downfall. Now, for how beautiful this theory
might sound to the general public, there is not a
single piece of evidence that suggests the phone
call even happened (SBGS). Taibbi himself, in a
2009 radio interview with WNYC, admitted “it’s
hard to make a concrete case”# that Blankfein
actually called Paulson asking to bail out AIG
and help Goldman. When asked the reason
behind his assumption that former Goldmanites
remain loyal to the firm,
his best reply was, “Well
it sure looks like that”#
(WNYC, 1:04 –1:30). His
sheer lack of evidence
and questionable
declarations, such as his
admittance that “there
was a little bit of
hyperbole that went into the [Goldman Sachs
article] headline,”#are both more than enough to
discredit the reliability of his reported “facts.”##
But if Goldman’s conspiracy is false, what really
happened? Simple: the government panicked at
the idea that the entire economy might collapse
like a domino. AIG, with its over 64,000
employees, is one of the largest companies in the
U.S., managing the pension funds of over 88
million customers worldwide and serving 98% of
the Fortune 500 companies worldwide (AIG
2013 annual report). Considering the significant
amount of money AIG oversees and owes to
major American banks, it is in the U.S.’s best
interest that the company does not fail: its
collapse would not only annihilate the savings of
thousands of Americans; it would also
simultaneously bring down the country's largest
interconnected banks one by one. It is for this
reason that when Lehman Brothers collapsed in
2007, the government panicked and resorted to
preventing the much-feared domino effect. The
best option Paulson had was to bail out the soon-
to-collapse AIG by giving the firm $85 billion.
Why AIG? Because it owed money to most of
the world’s major banks. Bailing out AIG was an
astute and efficient method to save all the
banks—and consequently the U.S. economy—in
one single move. Of that $85 billion in fact,
while $13 billion went to Goldman (as Taibbi
says), Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, France’s
Taibbi himself admitted that'
“it’s hard to make a concrete
case”'that Blankfein actually
called Paulson asking to bail
out AIG and help Goldman.#](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ae11de2c-2c0b-40b6-aa42-ccf1b818eb81-150709141155-lva1-app6891/85/WP3-LINKEDIN-4-320.jpg)
WP3 LINKEDIN
- 1. Rolling'Stone’s#Very#Own#Wolf#of#Wall#Street# Taibbi#Pushes#Dicey#“Facts”#on#Leading#Global#Investment#Bank# By'Vittorio'Masina' he Great Depression, the Tech Bubble, the Housing Craze, the 2007 Financial Crisis, the skyrocketing oil prices. According to Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone journalist and author of the article “The Great American Bubble Machine,”#all these major stains in the history of modern capitalism are attributable to the same, omnipotent super-villain: Goldman Sachs. # In his 10,000-word rant against Goldman, Taibbi depicts the bank as a power elite that has acted as the puppet master of the world economy for the past 100 years. Goldman is blamed for fooling thousands of investors into buying unreasonable amounts of (nonexistent) stocks in the twenties, bribing the CEOs of hundreds of companies to go public regardless of their profitability in the nineties, trafficking a trillion dollars worth of treacherous mortgages in the 2000s and—when the game slipped out of hand and Goldman was on the verge of bankruptcy—ordering the government to bail them out. All his accusations are supported by hard data and colorful explanations of intricate financial notions, making the article extremely dynamic and entertaining. # Then I checked the facts. For how good of a read it was, I was genuinely disappointed to find out how almost none of the data provided in the article matched that of official sources such as governmental and companies’#annual reports. In fact, the numbers Taibbi presents in his piece are either wrong or tremendously partial, deprived of context and employed to deceive (or better, mindlessly entertain) readers. # “The Great American Bubble Machine,”# therefore, cannot be considered an informative piece: facts are adapted to theories, and not vice versa, to give the public exactly what it wants—a villain to blame for its troubles. Taibbi’s story, often taking conspiratorial tones, seems in fact to reflect a trend in modern media that values entertainment and sales records over information and integrity—seemingly contradictory for an article against capitalism. # With the present piece I intend to bring objectivity back to the data, use it to outline the most reasonable and unbiased interpretation of Goldman’s history possible, and finally holistically evaluate Taibbi’s article in the complex frameworks of both modern capitalism and new media. # For those who have not yet read the article, here is a brief summary. # Taibbi’s Version! Everything started in 1869 when German immigrants Marcus Goldman and Samuel Sachs started a bank in New York City. From that moment, American history changed forever, as it only took a little less than a century for the bank to become the giant it is now, with its tentacles tightly wrapped around the face of humanity.# Soon after his brief introduction, Taibbi makes his first accusation, blaming Goldman for causing the Great Depression. The bank, confident that the prices of stocks would rise interminably, began mindlessly investing money it didn’t own to maximize profits. When the bubble popped in 1929, Goldman was incapable of returning its clients’# money (a total of 400 billion dollars), defaulted, and its bankers kept the millions.# This wasn’t it. After stealing from the pockets of Americans nationwide, Goldman was already seeking new opportunities for profit, the newest of which came about 65 years later under the glaring coat of the tech stock market boom. Once T
- 2. Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic# 2# again, Goldman ruthlessly took advantage of the situation; this time through the illegal practices of “laddering”#and “spinning”—two undercover forms of bribery that guarantee a rise in stock prices. Additionally, Goldman was pressuring its analysts to pump up their predictions and further inflate the bubble. # Goldman was so confident of its power that it didn’t even bother concealing these practices—a choice that, in retrospect, was not overly optimistic. In 2002, a major class-action lawsuit was filed against the bank; however, due to Goldman’s governmental connections, it only resulted in the ridiculous fine of some 110 million dollars—less than 2% of what the bank paid in salaries to its employees that year. Once again, when the bubble burst, Goldman didn’t lose a cent: all the money lost (about 5 trillion dollars) belonged solely to the investors. # Since experience had taught Goldman that bubbles were great opportunities, the bank did not hesitate to join the housing market speculation game in the 2000s. The trick was very similar to that of the tech bubble: the only difference was that this time, instead of risky stocks, the bank was trading unsafe mortgage packages. Taibbi calls this the “watermelon game”: players put all their money inside a watermelon, throw it out a 50-story-high window, and win if they take their money out before the crash. Since Goldman knew the watermelon was falling, instead of taking its money out, it convinced huge investors such as AIG to insure the bank’s investments—basically betting against its own ventures. This practice, carried out with the help of the country’s major rating agencies, was a scam known as “securities fraud.” The consequences of these speculations were, if possible, even more disastrous than those of the tech bubble: AIG defaulted, colossi such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns went down, and thousands of Americans watched their retirement savings disappear forever (over a trillion dollars in losses). The default of AIG, however, had consequences on Goldman too: for the first time ever, the bank was on the verge of collapse. # The conclusive section is probably the most important part of the entire article, as it consists of Taibbi’s bravest and most aggressive accusations against Goldman Sachs. In 2007 AIG, a private investment fund, received a multibillion-dollar-worth bailout from the government that saved it from collapsing—“too big to fail.”# However, of the 85 billion AIG received, 13 went to Goldman to cover the company’s debts owed to the investment bank. What Taibbi argues is that the “giant squid”# piloted the entire operation thanks to the support of its powerful “insiders,”# in particular former Goldman CEO turned Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. Not only did Goldman adjust the allocation of the money for its own profit; it also made sure that that money stayed away from its competitors. Yes, because there was only one giant bank that failed because of the bubble’s burst, and this bank happened to be one of Goldman’s historic rivals: Lehman Brothers. Paulson made sure—at least according to Taibbi—that the government saved every major bank in the US in 2007 (this is where the concept of being “too big to fail”# came about), allocating over 700 billion dollars through several programs, and then watched Lehman Brothers “collapse without intervention.”# This is not fair politics, Taibbi argues. It is not democracy, and it is not free capitalism: the system Goldman has created is an undercover authoritarian model in which a bank, not a government, makes all the decisions—a system Taibbi calls this the “watermelon game:”' players put all their money inside a watermelon, throw it out a 50-story window and win if they take their money out before the crash.#
- 3. Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic# 3# in which one corporation is so powerful and all- encompassing that it controls all of society without the people even noticing, while simultaneously taking their money. Taibbi says that while we can’t change this because we are too little, we should at least know what Goldman is doing.# Fact Checking! As aforementioned, the large majority of Taibbi’s beautiful theories and brutal accusations are founded on flawed data. It is far from my intention to claim that everything Taibbi says in the article is to be discredited: his most general points remain (I will evaluate them in the next section). At the same time, however, I firmly believe that using false information to back up a point—regardless of how good or true a point could possibly me—is never legitimate and is not to be accepted. For this reason, I will go over each of the article’s inaccuracies individually in the following paragraphs and explain the extent of their falsity or one- sidedness as thoroughly as possible. # The first accusation I intend to review is Taibbi’s claim that Goldman Sachs was “the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations”# during the tech boom. All this indictment does is reveal how little Taibbi knows—or wants the reader to know— about finance. Let me be more specific: first, Taibbi downplays the true complexity of IPOs, as he neglects to acknowledge how they require the joint efforts of several banks (usually no less than 50), each of which is technically an underwriter to the company; and second, he forgets to point out that regardless of Goldman efforts and resources, the bank never reached the top of the IPO market, which was always dominated by Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley (Moore). Just look at the numbers: even in 1999, the year of Goldman’s peak competitiveness, the bank was still making 20% less than leading institution, Morgan Stanley (50 billion underwritten by GS versus 62 billion by its competitor) (Moore). Taibbi made two mistakes in the same sentence: it is nonsensical to claim that Goldman was the underwriter of America’s# “wealthiest and most powerful corporations”# because every bank in the country was; and it is false to say it was the “chief underwriter”#as the IPO market data clearly shows it wasn’t. # A little different is Taibbi’s evaluation of Goldman’s “laddering”#and “spinning” practices. Here it is definitely possible to blame the bank, but blaming ONLY Goldman Sachs undoubtedly fails to portray the big picture. Although it is unfeasible to determine which bank was the father of these illegal practices, there exists plenty of evidence in support of the theory that basically every major bank on Wall Street had adopted them during the boom (Moore). Listing the several fines and settlement fees Goldman was required to pay at some point or another after the bubble burst, Taibbi singles out the bank, purposely inducing the reader to believe that the “squid”#was the only bad guy on Wall Street. I can concede: Goldman was indeed a bad guy, but certainly not the only one. The 2001 lawsuits filed against Goldman that Taibbi cited were, in fact, simultaneously filed to a total of 355 other large and small banks in the U.S., and they all were fined post-investigation (Moore). Moreover, none of these banks ended up paying more than what they had gained from illegally running Wall Street (Moore).# But the article’s inaccuracies don’t end here. Talking about how Goldman began underwriting subprime mortgages to profit from their high interest rates, Taibbi explains that nobody cognizant of the packages’# contents would ever buy them and that the bank’s only option was to deceive the clients by selling the subprime issues to “[people] who [didn’t] know what they [were].”#Although it is true that rating agencies The'large'majority'of' Taibbi’s'beautiful' theories'and'brutal' accusations'are'founded' on'flawed'data.#
- 4. Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic# 4# were rating these packages as AAA investments, the interest rates were way too high to constitute risk-free venture opportunities—nobody gifts money. So while I can believe that thousands of Americans not familiar with the world of finance were fooled by the promise of enormous returns on secure investments, it’s not convincing that the largest investors in the country would also fall into this trap (McArdle). What’s more likely is that investors deliberately decided to play the game to squeeze out as much profit as possible before the bubble popped (McArdle). AIG’s biggest mistake was not putting its money inside the watermelon; its biggest mistake was leaving it in for too long. # Claiming that Goldman committed securities fraud is false as well, since the bank's practice of shorting (betting against) its own investments is not illegal—arguably not even unethical. Goldman and AIG, in fact, had the same amount of information available, and if the “squid”# managed to realize that the bundles it had been trading were too risky, so could have (and should have) AIG. You can’t sue someone simply because he’s playing smart—you can, but you shouldn’t expect to win.# Finally, the section in which Taibbi makes his boldest claims is the one in which he analyzes— or better, interprets—the process that led the government to bail out Goldman Sachs with taxpayers’# money while letting Lehman Brothers, Goldman’s main competitor, go under without moving a finger. Taibbi supports the theory that just a couple days prior to AIG’s collapse, CEO of Goldman Lloyd Blankfein, called former Goldman CEO turned U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson asking for a bailout in sight of the huge losses the investment bank was to face as a result of AIG’s downfall. Now, for how beautiful this theory might sound to the general public, there is not a single piece of evidence that suggests the phone call even happened (SBGS). Taibbi himself, in a 2009 radio interview with WNYC, admitted “it’s hard to make a concrete case”# that Blankfein actually called Paulson asking to bail out AIG and help Goldman. When asked the reason behind his assumption that former Goldmanites remain loyal to the firm, his best reply was, “Well it sure looks like that”# (WNYC, 1:04 –1:30). His sheer lack of evidence and questionable declarations, such as his admittance that “there was a little bit of hyperbole that went into the [Goldman Sachs article] headline,”#are both more than enough to discredit the reliability of his reported “facts.”## But if Goldman’s conspiracy is false, what really happened? Simple: the government panicked at the idea that the entire economy might collapse like a domino. AIG, with its over 64,000 employees, is one of the largest companies in the U.S., managing the pension funds of over 88 million customers worldwide and serving 98% of the Fortune 500 companies worldwide (AIG 2013 annual report). Considering the significant amount of money AIG oversees and owes to major American banks, it is in the U.S.’s best interest that the company does not fail: its collapse would not only annihilate the savings of thousands of Americans; it would also simultaneously bring down the country's largest interconnected banks one by one. It is for this reason that when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2007, the government panicked and resorted to preventing the much-feared domino effect. The best option Paulson had was to bail out the soon- to-collapse AIG by giving the firm $85 billion. Why AIG? Because it owed money to most of the world’s major banks. Bailing out AIG was an astute and efficient method to save all the banks—and consequently the U.S. economy—in one single move. Of that $85 billion in fact, while $13 billion went to Goldman (as Taibbi says), Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, France’s Taibbi himself admitted that' “it’s hard to make a concrete case”'that Blankfein actually called Paulson asking to bail out AIG and help Goldman.#
- 5. Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic# 5# Society Generale, and Germany’s Deutsche Bank received $12 billion each, Barclays Plc received $6 billion, and Switzerland’s UBS received $5 billion (Moore). Needless to say, none of these figures besides the one regarding Goldman Sachs were reported by Taibbi.! A Critique of Modern Capitalism! Even if we cannot determine whether the bailout happened as a consequence of Goldman’s interactions with the government, we know for a fact that Paulson was in the room where the bailout decision was discussed, and this is very problematic in and of itself. Having a former CEO of GS in such a delicate position shouldn’t happen in a nation that upholds pure capitalism and free trade as primary values: his governmental presence, let alone his position as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, is enough to generate a conflict of interest. # A well-known, fundamental economic notion since Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”: is as follows: whenever competition in a market is interrupted by any type of imperfect interaction (calling imperfect everything that deviates from “natural”# perfect competition), an imbalance between supply and demand occurs; the price is no longer determined “naturally,”# and deadweight loss is inevitably created (The Wealth of Nations). It is for this reason Smith explicitly claims that, with a perfectly competitive capitalistic model, banks should remain small and not differ from any other businesses. Colossi such as Goldman, Morgan, etc. create a pseudo-monopoly in which it is extremely easy for the few, huge banks of the economy to collude and increase personal profit at the expense of society. Moreover, their size makes these superbusinesses “too big to fail,”#a known position they readily exploit. “Too big to fail,”# in fact, is now a very concrete status embodied by a written agreement:#“Safety Net,” the government’s overt protection of America’s largest banks (Volcker). This protection, born to benefit the average American citizen by shielding his savings and retirement money under the virtually unlimited resources of the Federal Bank, has in fact produced the opposite result: megabanks such as Goldman Sachs have felt entitled to take more risks, confident that if things were to head south, they would simply receive a bailout (SBGS).# Going Beyond the Content! Besides the mere financial content of his work, I see Taibbi’s article as a potentially useful exercise in critical thinking. The reader has the opportunity to go beyond the sensationalistic language and the metaphors to discover that Taibbi is simply presenting a topic—world finance—in a way contrary to the ordinary.# The problem is, if you don’t want to think with your own head, you end up believing 100% of his “hyperbolic”# recount. If, however, you take this colorful article as a starting point for your own thinking, you will find yourself analyzing a problem you probably (at least in my case) have never thoroughly considered. You will start questioning how democratic America’s capitalistic system really is, how big and important private interests are, and how dangerous it is for a country to have a former private banker as Secretary of the Treasury. If you are obtuse, unfortunately, this article will just augment, or instigate, your hate for Goldman Sachs as the source of all evil in America; and of course, you would make this judgment using the extent of your financial knowledge—which was practically nonexistent prior to reading Taibbi’s article, and is probably equally as absent after. But if you are smart, you will seize the opportunity to think critically, do some research, read other articles on the topic, and locate possibly unbiased data. This is the only way you will be able to build your own informed opinion on the very delicate and extremely controversial topic of world finance. But it requires time and effort. An unconventional opinion isn’t in fact any better than a conventional one if both are the result of misinformation; in both cases, the reader is too busy (too lazy) to think with his own head. He lets Taibbi decide for him what is
- 6. Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic# 6# right and what is wrong, who is the hero and who is the villain. The reader candidly goes on ignoring all the structural conditions that generated the problem in the first place. # This type of writing fits dramatically well into the framework of new media, where dynamism and entertainment are valued over coherency and information. And the people seem to like it. We have seen how most of the data presented is either one-sided or false, how Taibbi’s sources are nonexistent or overly general, and how imprecise his explanations are. However, if you look at the comment section under his Rolling Stone article online, you will find that the great majority adulates Taibbi for finally opening their eyes. # Truth is, instead of publishing solid, fact- checked, thought-provoking stories that inform the reader while still providing a certain degree of entertainment, magazines too often yield to the temptation of commercialization and publicity. By publishing articles such as “The Great American Bubble Machine”# or the much more recent University of Virginia rape story, Rolling Stone is simply choosing the short-term gains associated with temporarily high circulation records over the magazine’s long- term interests. Such a decision, in fact, is taken at the expense of the magazine’s authority and consequently, future sales; in order to buy them, people must sincerely believe these stories to be true, but every edition is a bomb that could potentially destroy the magazine’s credibility. # By selling unscrupulous stories, Rolling Stone decides to engage in a risky and arguably unethical practice that increases short-term profit at the expense of long-term gains.# Now take that last paragraph and replace “unscrupulous stories”#with “subprime mortgage bundles”# and “Rolling Stone”# with “Goldman Sachs.”# It sounds a lot like one of those accusations Taibbi was making in his article, doesn’t it? # Rolling Stone knows what happened to Goldman when the game slipped out of hand. It is well aware of the risks it’s taking. It is just too busy looking for the next sensational story to listen to its own advice. #
- 7. Rolling Stone’s Very Own Wolf of Wall Street The Atlantic# 7# Works Cited# Gasparino, Charlie. “Stop Blaming Goldman Sachs” The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, n.d. Web. 01 May 2015.# "Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs." WNYC. WNYC, n.d. Web. 01 May 2015. McArdle, Megan. "Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 10 July 2009. Web. 05 May 2015. Moore, Heidi N. "Matt Taibbi Is Just Plain Wrong about Goldman Sachs." N.p., n.d. Web. # Taibbi, Matt. "The Great American Bubble Machine." Rolling Stone. N.p., 05 Apr. 2010. Web. Volcker, Paul. "How to Reform Our Financial System." The New York Times. The New York Times, 30 Jan. 2010. Web. 01 May 2015.# # Works Consulted# "Bailout Bank Bio: Goldman Sachs." Bailout Bank Bio: Goldman Sachs. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2015.McArdle, Megan. # McCarthy, Ryan. "Matt Taibbi: Fact-Checkers Almost Killed My 'Vampire Squid' Line About Goldman Sachs." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 01 May 2015.# "Tenacious G." NYMag.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2015.#