Ordinarily I'd make an effort to keep an open mind -- even if I'm being asked to believe that Rolling Stone could print a piece that gave Ivy League JD/MBAs and mathematical finance PhD's anything close to a fair hearing without royally pissing off their core audience of people who pay money to read about rock stars and Paris Hilton.

But this author has a history of oversimplification and allegation-slinging that almost makes you believe his real goal is to sell that audience it can get righteously worked-up over.

Here are two blurbs about the piece Taibbi wrote about Goldman Sachs in July, from journalists at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

First, progressive Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine:

Someone also asked [Ezra Klein] about Matt Taibbi's takedown of Goldman Sachs in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. I finally got around to reading it the other day, and my verdict is simple: it was terrible. Taibbi wrote a terrific article about AIG a couple of months ago, but the Goldman piece was just phoned in, a long series of blustery assertions with essentially nothing to back up any of them. If he wants to claim that Goldman was the wizard behind the curtain of everything from the dotcom boom to last year's oil spike, he really needs to produce some evidence for it instead of just saying so. (http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/07/furloughs-and-perk...)

And libertarian Megan McArdle of the Atlantic:

I think, sadly, [that] Matt Taibbi is becoming the Sarah Palin of journalism. He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that. And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites.

Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire. But financial meltdowns don't offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system. Confronted with this, Taibbi doesn't back away from the narrative form, or apply it to smaller questions where it is more appropriate, as William Cohan did in House of Cards. Instead, he grabs whoever's nearest to hand and builds them up into a gigantic straw villian, which he proceeds to bash with a handful of recently acquired technical terms that he clearly doesn't quite understand. It's not that everything he says is wrong, but the bits that are true aren't interesting, and the bits that are interesting aren't true. (http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/matt_ta...)

.. and here's the takedown of this piece:

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=12&#...

Taibbi got people confused because they had similar last names, got people's titles confused, claimed Geithner was hired by Citigroup (he's never worked for a bank), and accepted ludicrous worst-case scenario estimates for the outcome of the recovery.

I know people will find this article congenial because the recovery is unpopular, but Taibbi, good writer though he is, has been blazing a trail of crappy reporting on the government as well as the workings of the actual market (read his ramblings on algorithmic trading, for instance).

This isn't serious reporting. It's no more credible than a DailyKos piece.

This article does an excellent job of describing the moral hazard that Robert Rubin helped create and profit from.

1)Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary was a key player in repealing Glass-Steagal, a damn good law that prevented a single bank from conducting both commercial and investment operations. 2) After the law was passed he went to work for Citibank, earning over 100 million dollars, helping them create a megabank that combined investment and commercial banking. 3) Citibank ran into serious trouble during the current financial crisis, was deemed to big to fail, and was bailed out by the taxpayer.

That ain't how capitalism should work.