Why would Rolling Stone want to demonize the financiers of capitalism?
To sell copies of their magazine? To push their political agenda? To sell copies of their magazine? For the attention it'll give them? To sell copies of their magazine?
On the other hand I won't dismiss this out of hand like you.
The nature of investment banking is that it is intimately tied to the markets. Any time the markets do
anything at all, good or bad, up or down, nice or nasty, the investment banks are going to be right there in the middle of it. Their job is to facilitate what their customers want, and often that means helping their customers make bad investments.
So lemme take a guess at how this story goes: Goldman is always nearby when something bad happens in the markets, and yet somehow they manage to make money from it unlike the unwashed masses, the poor helpless little-guy investors. How can it be possible that Goldman can
make money when the market is
down? Ah ha! It must be because they're eeevil little bastages who are secretly pulling the strings of capitalism all over the world. Hank Paulson was a Goldman shill, and he's not the only one, they're all secretly rigging the game in their favor so that they can fleece the little guy.
Throw in a good heaping dose of personal vitriol against some big names from Goldman, wrap it all up in clever emotional sensationalism, and you have an easy way to sell magazines to fools looking for someone to blame for the recent financial mess.
