"transparency" means giving the whitehouse press pool more things to copy and paste...,
2010-04-29 09:10:30
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closed for retractions...,
2010-04-29 14:24:15
the bank's favorite left:
This article in the American Spectator about how the left loves Goldman Sachs is really awesome. They say Goldman got where it is because of ever expanding government regulations. The past 30 years of bipartisan financial deregulation that created the shadow banking system? Were it ever mentioned I guess it would just serve as further inexplicable proof that "the bigger and more stifling government gets, the more profit Goldman makes".
Nearly doubling their lobbying activities to kill regulations inimical to its enormous conflicts of interest are just additional evidence, presumably, that "Goldman supports disastrous Big Government policies".
They never mention of course that the single greatest act of federal intervention on behalf Goldman Sachs in return for campaign cash was the Bush Administration's bailout of AIG. On this at least the writer is consistent: not a single specific example of government intervention or regulation or what they might mean is ever mentioned in an article about how Goldman Sachs has used the government to defend itself from competition. One could argue that the government letting Lehman fall helped Goldman Sachs, but if the lack of a bailout for Lehman was bigger government and bailing out Lehman would have been bigger government, how do we get smaller government? I'm beginning to suspect that on general principle small government conservatives don't actually believe there is such thing as smaller government. It doesn't matter what it does, it's always bigger and it's always to blame.
But it stands to reason that the author couldn't think of a single example of egregious over-regulation, since the path to the bailouts was carved with garden shears and a chainsaw.
