Goldman Sachs method is to 'hug governments close' so public interest and Goldman Sachs interest appear the same. In run up to 2008 financial crisis, big banks including Goldman effectively merged with US gov-UK Independent, Nov. 2011

.
Nov. 2011 article

11/18/2011, "What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe," UK Independent, Stephen Foley

"Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund economist, in his book 13 Bankers, argued that Goldman Sachs and the other large banks had become so close to government in the run-up to the financial crisis that the US was effectively an oligarchy....

This is The Goldman Sachs Project. Put simply, it is to hug governments close. Every business wants to advance its interests with the regulators that can stymie them and the politicians who can give them a tax break, but this is no mere lobbying effort. Goldman is there to provide advice for governments and to provide financing, to send its people into public service and to dangle lucrative jobs in front of people coming out of government. The Project is to create such a deep exchange of people and ideas and money that it is impossible to tell the difference between the public interest and the Goldman Sachs interest."...

"Stephen Foley is a former Associate Business Editor of The Independent, based in New York. He left in August 2012. In a decade at the paper, he covered personal finance, the UK stock market and the pharmaceuticals industry, and had also been the Business section's share tipster. Between arriving with three suitcases in Manhattan in January 2006 and his departure, he witnessed and reported on a great economic boom turning spectacularly to bust. In March 2009, he was named Business and Finance Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards."

===================

1/22/2011, "13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown," by Simon Johnson and James Kwak 

"In spite of its key role in creating the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, the American banking industry has grown bigger, more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six megabanks whose assets amount to more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, this oligarchy proved it could first hold the global economy hostage and then use its political muscle to fight off meaningful reform. 13 Bankers brilliantly charts the rise to power of the financial sector and forcefully argues that we must break up the big banks if we want to avoid future financial catastrophes." from Amazon.com

Authors: Simon Johnson, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Kwak, a former consultant for McKinsey

.............................

July 2009 Rolling Stone article: Americans are robbed in broad daylight by Goldman Sachs and they accept it:

7/02/2009, "The Great American Bubble Machine: How Goldman Sachs has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since the Great Depression," Rolling Stone, by Matt Taibbi

scroll to, "Bubble #6 Global Warming"

"A groundbreaking new commodities bubble,

• disguised as an "environmental plan" called cap-and-trade.

The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman except it has one delicious new wrinkle:

If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices

• will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game.

It will be rigged in advance....

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going."

..................