Goldman Sachs alumni have served as Treasury Secretary (Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson, Steven Mnuchin), NEC Director (Gary Cohn), NY Fed President (William Dudley), World Bank President, and heads of central banks globally. Matt Taibbi famously called Goldman 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.' During the 2008 crisis, Treasury Secretary Paulson (ex-Goldman CEO) decided to let Goldman's rival Lehman Brothers fail while bailing out AIG -- which owed Goldman $12.9 billion.
“Goldman Sachs doesn't just influence government financial policy -- it essentially writes it, by placing its executives in every key regulatory and policy position, then profiting from the rules they create.”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
When journalist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity" in a 2010 Rolling Stone article, the phrase was meant as colorful metaphor. What made people pause, however, was the specific claim buried beneath the rhetoric: that Goldman's influence extended far beyond Wall Street into the halls of government itself, shaping policy from the inside.
This wasn't a fringe conspiracy theory. It was an observation about a documented pattern. Yet for years, the claim faced dismissal from establishment figures who argued that talented finance professionals serving in government was simply how meritocratic systems worked. Critics were accused of engaging in conspiratorial thinking, as if pointing out a factual pattern somehow crossed into unfounded speculation.
The evidence, however, tells a different story.
Robert Rubin, who served as Treasury Secretary under Clinton from 1995 to 1999, had previously spent decades at Goldman Sachs, eventually becoming co-chair. His successor, Hank Paulson, didn't just work at Goldman—he was its CEO before taking over Treasury in 2006. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Paulson held enormous power over which institutions lived and which died. His decision to allow Lehman Brothers to fail while arranging a government bailout for AIG raised immediate questions about conflict of interest. AIG, which received approximately $180 billion in taxpayer money, owed Goldman Sachs $12.9 billion—money that Goldman received in full because of the government rescue.
The pattern extended beyond the Treasury Department. Gary Cohn, another executive, became Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump. William Dudley, a former Goldman managing director, served as President of the Bank of New York from 2009 to 2018—a position of enormous influence over banking regulation.
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Internationally, the revolving door spun just as actively. Goldman Sachs alumni have held positions as heads of central banks and leaders of financial institutions worldwide, including the presidency of the World Bank. Academic researchers attempting to quantify this phenomenon found the pattern too consistent to dismiss as coincidence.
What made this claim "partially verified" rather than fully confirmed is that Goldman Sachs executives occupied these positions, but proving they directly coordinated to profit from specific policies required connecting dots that official investigations largely avoided. The 2008 crisis response offers circumstantial evidence—Paulson's bailout decisions simultaneously benefited his former employer—but no smoking gun memo exists proving intentional coordination.
Yet the partial verification might actually be more damning than full confirmation would be. It suggests the system operates without requiring explicit coordination. When people from the same institution move between government and finance, they carry shared assumptions about how markets work, what policies serve "stability," and which companies are "too big to fail." These shared assumptions can produce coordinated outcomes without anyone explicitly conspiring.
This matters because it reveals something uncomfortable about democratic institutions: they may be structurally compromised in ways that don't require dramatic conspiracy. When the people setting financial regulations spent their careers at the institutions they're now regulating, public trust becomes something earned rather than assumed. The fact that this pattern was initially dismissed as paranoid thinking—only to be later documented in academic studies—suggests we should be careful about dismissing inconvenient patterns out of hand.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.3% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~50Network
Secret kept
16.8 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
