Don’t Dismiss Taibbi's Take on Goldman Sachs
What the mainstream press can learn from a Goldman takedown
By Dean Starkman
Columbia Journalism Review
Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.
The Rolling Stone writer cemented his status as the enfant terrible of the business press with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a 10,000-word excoriation of Goldman Sachs, a muckraker’s-eye view of Goldman history, exploring the bank’s and Wall Street’s contributions to various financial disasters, starting with the Great Depression, skipping to the Tech Wreck, the Mortgage Wreck, the oil bubble of 2008, the bailout, and the looming cap-and-trade plan. Salted with “fuck”s, “shit”s and written with brio and hyperbole in the New Journalism tradition, it caught the financial community, which very much includes the financial media, utterly off-guard, unused as it is to hearing its flagship described as a “giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”
Financial cognoscenti quickly sought to dismiss the piece as so much conspiracy-mongering perpetrated by a financial illiterate. Funny, but that illiterate’s piece ran more than a month ago, and people can’t stop talking about it. Perhaps not coincidentally, it feels like the general financial news has been all-Goldman, all-the-time ever since.
(More here.)
By Dean Starkman
Columbia Journalism Review
Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.
The Rolling Stone writer cemented his status as the enfant terrible of the business press with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a 10,000-word excoriation of Goldman Sachs, a muckraker’s-eye view of Goldman history, exploring the bank’s and Wall Street’s contributions to various financial disasters, starting with the Great Depression, skipping to the Tech Wreck, the Mortgage Wreck, the oil bubble of 2008, the bailout, and the looming cap-and-trade plan. Salted with “fuck”s, “shit”s and written with brio and hyperbole in the New Journalism tradition, it caught the financial community, which very much includes the financial media, utterly off-guard, unused as it is to hearing its flagship described as a “giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”
Financial cognoscenti quickly sought to dismiss the piece as so much conspiracy-mongering perpetrated by a financial illiterate. Funny, but that illiterate’s piece ran more than a month ago, and people can’t stop talking about it. Perhaps not coincidentally, it feels like the general financial news has been all-Goldman, all-the-time ever since.
(More here.)
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