As Goldman Sachs alumni play a key role in stewarding the nation’s economy, it’s worth recalling that the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith blamed Goldman Sachs for helping to cause the Great Depression. In his book, The Great Crash, 1929, Galbraith, a key figure in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, devoted an entire chapter he titled “In Goldman, Sachs, We Trust,” to detailing the “large-scale corporate thimblerigging” that Goldman and other Wall Street firms practiced in the 1920s.
Thimbleriggers or not, supremely self-assured Goldman Sachs alumni at the highest levels of the Bush administration are now pulling the levers of power in the nation’s capital, confident that they know the way out of the current market turbulence.
Their power is likely to grow no matter who’s in charge in Washington. Commentator David Brooks may not have been joking when he observed this summer: “over the past few years, people from Goldman Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the federal government. Over the next few, they might just take over the whole darn thing.”
http://spectator.org/archives/2008/10/16/goldman-sachs-government