Is Goldman Sachs Evil? Or Just Too Good? -- New York Magazine

Is Goldman Sachs Evil? Or Just Too Good? -- New York Magazine: "“If you didn’t like the policy,” he says of the decision to bail out AIG and pay off its debts to Goldman, “one avenue for pursuing your own interests was to attack Goldman Sachs.”

It’s a sore spot for good reason. The AIG rescue is the incident from which all other Goldman conspiracy theories spring—the original sin, in a sense, of Goldman’s current public tarring. It’s the act that first made the average man on the street sit up and say, “Hey, wait a minute. The secretary of the Treasury, who used to be the Goldman CEO, just spent $85 billion to buy a failing insurance giant that happened to owe his former firm a lot of money. Does that smell right to you?” It also seems to have the legs of a potential scandal, with Neil Barofsky, the inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, conducting an audit of the buyout.

Then again, if you’ve just posted $3.44 billion in second-quarter profits in an environment where, say, Morgan Stanley just reported a $1.26 billion loss, what does it matter what people say? The answer lies in another of Whitehead’s principles: Reputation must be closely guarded, because it is “the most difficult to regain.”"