At Goldman, Matt Taibbi Fires and Misses

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

By John Tamny of RealClearMarkets

In a piece written to shed light on the allegedly evil doings of Goldman Sachs, Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi unwittingly let readers in on why the majority of his strident protests against Wall Street’s most prominent bank were near meaningless. For those who caught on, they likely quit reading halfway through. Sadly for this somewhat masochistic writer, pure curiosity took him to the bitter end.
 
But for those not privy to the article in question, about credit-default swaps Taibbi observed that they “were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won’t.” For a piece which included no less than 29 mentions of the word “bubble”, and almost as many variations of the word “speculation”, could Taibbi have really been so dim as to acknowledge that “speculation” is always and everywhere a two-way street?

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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