The Goldman Sachs metaphor that stuck

Goldman is worse than a monster squid, and there's nothing funny about it; it's a den of thieves, regulators who become bankers and back again, using relationships and half backed economic theories to exploit the economies across the globe. It's nothing more than a banking toll booth populated by little people with vast wealth, that excises a tax on everything that moves. Goldman is the real Mafia.

Goldman rose from a troubled partnership with a twisted capital structure, to a public company with perverse incentives for retiring government officials who should have been red shirted from doing the deals they did in the Bush-Clinton-Bush years. The have churned up vast wealth by exploiting Chinese growth (the rest of "BRIC", their term because they knew it best) and all this great American deregulation (decline and destruction of domestic competition by monopolies, like Goldman).

But Bush-Clinton were the foxes guarding the hen house, so nobody prevented government officials from siding up to Goldman in spite of rational people sounding the alarms the entire time. "Conflict of interest" became a punchline as Sock Puppet IPOs were the norm.