Would you like to read something weird? Here is a Goldman Sachs press release headlined "OP-ED, THE HUFFINGTON POST – ARIANNA HUFFINGTON AND LLOYD C. BLANKFEIN DISCUSS OUR COMMON GOAL: EMPOWERING ENTREPRENEURS AND CREATING JOBS."

I mean, some of it is true! Goldman Sachs does indeed mentor women all over the world in creating small businesses, and their 10,000 Women project is actually one of the most interesting programs in the world. And then there's this: This past summer, The Huffington Post broke new ground in the way the media commonly report economic news. Frustrated by the relentless coverage of disaster, tragedy and scandal in traditional media sources, The [...]

Oh, the constant see-sawing of Michael Bloomberg from hero to villain! Remember how we were loving him again just last month when he made that big old matching donation to Planned Parenthood? Well, a lot has changed in a month.

• The hand-holding visit to Goldman Sachs, followed by the trip to Shake Shack with Goldman co-CEO Lloyd Blankfein, in the wake of the resignation-by-op-ed of Greg Smith? That went over quite poorly. Dude: you already held their hand, in the form of tens of millions of dollars in concessions. Also, the City even gave them the address of 200 West Street, which should have been 201 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

The Greek island known variously as Holy Ghost, The Island of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Holy Trinity, or just plain Trinity, owes its greatest renown, despite its lavish New Testamentish nomenclature, to the cameo role it played in the pagan classical age. This 12-acre slip of an atoll was a staging ground for the Persian armies laying siege to Thermopylae, the famed last stand of those hot, well-oiled Spartan souls hymned by our own latter-day Thucydides, Frank Miller. Now, however, Greek government officials are straining to find a way to convert Holy Ghost, and the nation's 6000 or so other island outcroppings into [...]

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: We have just received word that an "icing" in fact has taken place among bros at Goldman Sachs. Our original statement of this morning that no icings have yet taken place at Goldman has been altered; we regret the error and also, wow, are you kidding? And here is the Wieden-Kennedy interoffice memo that is oddly pro icing. Suspicious! [UPDATE: Um, that memo has just been disappeared from the Voice's website. SUSPICIOUSER. ANOTHER UPDATE: here's the cache of the memo.]

Have you been out of the workplace for two or more years? Perhaps because you were laid off by a financial service company, such as Goldman Sachs, who had repeated layoffs of thousands of employees, for a bit of free—and, with the exception of one harrowing quarter, unnecessary—cash to have handy in the recent financial crisis? Good news! The Goldman Sachs Returnship® Program (yes) is offering ten-week paid internships for people just like you, those were cast out of the workplace as dead weight to appease the bottom line (sorry, who took an "extended career break"). Goldman Sachs is "committed to help facilitate the on-ramping process"! Some of these [...]

Everyone online is sort of sniffing at the already-infamous "Why I'm Leaving Goldman Sachs" op-ed in today's Times, and much of that sniffing is understandable. Lots of people definitely know, assume or simply believe that Goldman has been for much of the last decade (or longer) in the service of steering their clients wrong in favor of profits. This is a totally reasonable (and valid!) conclusion, after all, after the activity of the last five years. (Particularly for anyone who saw their incredibly terrible returns on investment after ill-timed BRIC-chasing and plenty of other recession-era disasters.) And so their point is: well, what were you doing, Greg [...]

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 [...]

Here, let us fix this strange omission from this news brief for you, New York Times! "The William J. Clinton Foundation is moving most of its offices from Harlem to 77 Water Street in the financial district, in Lower Manhattan" … where, the paper might mention, Clinton will be subleasing from Goldman Sachs until 2013, at which point the lease is with the owners. (Space which has been vacant for, what, eight years? And had been gut-renovated by Goldman and then never used.) Just so we're clear!

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.

But as Louise Story makes clear in a New York Times dispatch from the arcane battles over disclosures in the derivatives market, the real reason that investment banks resent government intrusion is that is too much, rather than too little, competition. They believe that picking winners and losers is clearly their job. Storey gamely tries to report on the doings of a nine-member conclave of New [...]

Today's Goldman Sachs report on the U.S. banking industry has an amusing section where they have quite a number of graphs to prove that we're not going to end up like Japan. They write: "The collapse of an enormous asset bubble, a banking and credit crisis, zero interest rates, central bank balance sheet expansion, and massive fiscal stimulus have caused some people to question whether the scenario here could continue to play out like Japan, where loans declined for eight years after the peak and interest rates remained near zero." Loan shrinkage has indeed been trending just like Japan-but the U.S. cut interest rates and addressed a looming crisis much [...]

For those few who actually care (and I suggest that you should, if you want to progress in understanding the current American mania about Evil Wall Street!), here is Goldman Sachs' brutal response to today's rather wacko Times article. Setting aside the whole part where Goldman rather wildly describes the story as full of "grave inaccuracies" and as being "fundamentally misleading," there's at least one really great point made.

"Fears Rise That Economy May Falter in the Spring"; "Economic Reports Fan Fears": Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are going real big today on the surprising news that the economy might not be "good" over the next few months. Oh noes! What did we know and when did we know it!?

Well, on April 11th, Goldman Sachs published a U.S. Daily report headlined "A Road Map for Sluggish Q2 Growth," which said pretty much the same thing, well in advance of the job numbers released yesterday: "After months of stronger-than-expected data, the US economy has started to lose momentum." They also cite [...]

I've always worried about the Sergey Aleynikov case. Convicted 15 months ago and sentenced to eight years in prison, Aleynikov's crime, while employed at Goldman Sachs, was uploading chunks of software to an encrypted server for storage—possibly accidentally including proprietary code while trying to retain open-source stuff. (For a good description of what happened, there's this account.) Some of the problems with this case include that juries and judges are crazily out of their depth in figuring out what his actions mean and which are customary and ordinary for programmers, and also the media is way worse: most of the headlines called him a "spy," which is [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Worried about the economic impact of the Gulf Oil Disaster? Don't be! There's still money to be made! "Clean Harbors (CLH) is highly involved in the GoM cleanup effort; we estimate CLH will generate $1.0 bn of revenue from the cleanup effort over the next three years," writes a Goldman Sachs analyst. The math in their report, issued yesterday, is based largely on Exxon Valdez: "Exxon spent approximately $8,100 per barrel of oil spilled in cleanup efforts. Adjusting for inflation (we have assumed 3% per year), we estimate the cost of the cleanup to be $15,000 per barrel in 2010." And what of BP? "GS European analyst Michele della Vigna, [...]