Lifted from Bloomberg

[KarlMarx_MiddleClass_Ipod_HipHop]

"Their own traders and salespeople in subprime mortgages and related
securities had put Goldman in exactly the same position as every other
Wall Street firm: long subprime mortgages.

The only difference between Goldman and everyone else was that Goldman
had, in effect, an entirely separate enterprise, sitting on top of the
firm, with the power to reverse the judgment of its own supposed
experts in various markets. They were able to do this, apparently,
without ever saying a word about it to their own traders. Instead of
telling the fools trading subprime mortgages that they are wrong, and
that they should unwind their positions, they simply offset their
trades...a lot of these so-called risk managers never really had the
power to manage risk. They had to consider the feelings, for example,
of the guys who ran subprime mortgages....

But at Goldman there were two intelligences at work: one, the ordinary
Wall Street intelligence, which was allowed to get itself in trouble,
just as at every other Wall Street firm; the other, more like an
extremely smart hedge fund that made its living off the idiocy of big
Wall Street firms, including its own people...And this second, higher
intelligence was allowed to make a mockery of the labors of the first.
I can't think of another example of a big Wall Street firm saying so
clearly through its trading positions as Goldman Sachs did over the
past year that it thinks the rest of its industry, including its own
people, is a bunch of idiots. They have obviously designed their firm
to take into account their idiocy -- without ever having to put too
fine a point on it."

[KarlMarx_MiddleClass_Ipod_HipHop]

"Golden Slacks made out due to sheer luck. As reported in the WSJ,
they brought an outsider in to run the mortgage department a year
before the sub-prime crisis began. This outsider (I knew him in
college, a smart guy then, but wow, no-one would have thought he had
this in him) had to drag the leadership of GS into supporting his
making a huge short position on mortgages.

The story had the ring of truth to it. The scandal is not insider
information, but that, again, the smartest guys on Wall Street knew a
lot less than they claimed to know. And a small-college hard-drinking
hockey player who never went to graduate school kicked the ass of all
the MBAs and PhDs out there. "