I have had an NYPD-issued press pass twice. In New York City, the press is "credentialed" by the police department, independently of the City, at its discretion. The process is slow and you have to go downtown for quite a while. Both times I have been very careful to play their game. You have to bring published clips, among their required materials, that prove you need to deal with things like "robbery scenes, fires, homicides, train wrecks, bombings, plane crashes, where there are established police or fire lines at the scene." Now I'm by no means a real reporter's reporter, but I succeeded both times by bringing past stories that had, like, scenery of Hillary Clinton in a St. Patrick's Day parade and what have you. On my most recent successful trip, I went with real reporters—and some of them got denied, and most definitely shouldn't have been, while by working the system, I scored. The point that you'd need to be already doing that reporting to get credentialed (by the police!) to do that reporting is a good one. All this is a preamble to pointing out that yesterday we got used by the mayor's office. READ MORE

Nerds will appreciate today the strangest bit of sourcing ever used in the New York Times. The subject is Goldman Sachs employee-scapegoat Fabrice Tourre, whose emails "have been made available," to use the sort of passive construction the paper enjoys, to the Times for some unknown time. They were "provided by" a Nancy Cohen, "who says she found the materials in a laptop she had been given by a friend in 2006." Heh, go on? "The friend told her he had happened upon the laptop discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building. E-mail messages for Mr. Tourre continued streaming into the device...." Obviously, as has been pointed out, this went through the Times legal department mill, to the point where it says far less than it should. But if you assume that this means that the Times has access to Tourre's actual, current work email, you'd have to be wrong. READ MORE

It's the feel-good story of the morning: Goldman Sachs took $1.3 billion of Libya's money in 2008 and promptly turned it into no money at all, according to the WSJ: "The $1.3 billion of option investments were hit especially hard. The underlying securities plunged in value and all of the trades lost money, according to an internal Goldman memo reviewed by the Journal. The memo said the investments were worth just $25.1 million as of February 2010—a decline of 98%." That is particularly delightful. And then, the panicked firm offered the foul government a number of chances to make their money back, but nothing ever came of it. On the plus side, they have so much money that they wouldn't really notice the $1.3 billion disappearing into garbage investments—and meanwhile, many of the people mismanaging the money jumped ship for even-more profitable pastures when they saw the writing on the recession wall. Now much of Libya's money, which is essentially stolen from its citizens, is frozen, and Army leaders are defecting while NATO bombs and baloney "truce" talks occur.

By now, you will have tried to read Matt Taibbi's latest, which makes the case, which in my book was already made, that there should be criminal investigations at Goldman Sachs. I say "tried" because this is rough going. (And yes: Matt Taibbi, God bless!) And he's not wrong! Many of us have accustomed ourselves over the last few years to reading about regulatory whatnots and tranchey thingamabobs, and while it'll always be an uncomfortable second nature, at least writing about financial instruments follows some rules. But it's not the finance that's hard. For one, there's sentences like this one: "Each of the deals appears to represent a different and innovative brand of shamelessness and deceit." Now, I'm sorry the legal department made you say "appears to," even though it is technically accurate that we only know for sure that there is an appearance of deceit. But the helpful analogies! READ MORE

For those of you who don't, somehow, do your private banking with Goldman Sachs, you won't see their just-issued report on the AOL purchase of the Huffington Post. For starters, they expect "retention compensation" to offset the Huffington Post's earnings—that the introduction of the Huffington Post will have no impact whatsoever on AOL's projected 2011 earnings. Although: "We view this acquisition as further solidifying AOL’s stance as an owner of valuable focused content channels, similar to cable networks...." Here comes the bonus: trashing Yahoo! "We consider this acquisition strategically valuable from the perspective of (1) brand building; (2) mobile distribution; and (3) differentiated content as it distinguishes AOL’s focused approach from Yahoo!’s 'everything to all people' strategy." Yow! GS remains neutral on AOL. (Also the company "expects to receive or intends to seek compensation for investment banking services in the next 3 months" from AOL.)

Goldman Sachs released a report today Wednesday for its clients about unemployment, and finds that extension of unemployment benefits in a recession does not actually make workers lazy and unwilling to work. READ MORE

Apart from the sinister specter of socialism, the most common complaint raised against increased federal oversight of our financial markets is that it empowers aloof bureaucrats to “pick winners and losers” on Wall Street, and therefore defiles the essence of free-market competition. READ MORE

Goldman Sachs has a new ad campaign for their Asset Management division! I'm not really sure why this is something they need to market. It's probably less true in asset management but in Private Wealth Management, certainly, they inherit their clients, and it's not like it's a tough sell to sign up a few more millionaires at GS. The company makes them money! And even though their clients don't like the firm necessarily, it's not like they ever leave with their money. For where? Wachovia? Anyway the new campaign is pretty funny because, in this iteration, from their website, there's a woman in cowboy boots—taking a train! (A very clean train, in a very clean station.) A woman who apparently used to sleep in something the poor people call "a bunk bed"? So yes, this is how they pimp mutual funds, to appeal to the aspirational set of the semi-average rich little people who, it appears, can also hustle in their own way into the big money tent.