Pity the Goldman Sachs banker who is recently learning that money can’t buy you friends, but it sure can make you a lot of enemies. And while its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, claimed earlier this year that the bank was merely doing “God’s work”, critics are somewhat less complimentary of the company’s plans to dish out $US16.7 billion ($A18.7 billion) in pay to its employees this year — equivalent to $US527,192 for each employee.

While not quite in the realms of Matt Taibbi’s infamous Goldman expose earlier this year in Rolling Stone magazine (where the bank was accused of being “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”), a recent article appearing in Bloomberg was highly critical of the bank’s willingness to accept government aid and its knack of profiting from risky proprietary trading.

Goldman has benefited from US taxpayer assistance in two major ways (and a third, if you count the $US13 billion it received from the rescue of AIG in 2008). First, Goldman was lent $US10 billion in TARP monies during its hour of need. While the money lent was arguably necessary to ensure confidence in the financial system (and prevent a “run on the banks”) many claim that the US government should have driven a harder bargain with banks (of which Goldman was merely one of many).

William Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator, told Bloomberg that TARP was:

An unbelievably bad deal … we could hire any middle-tier guy or gal at Goldman, and they would tell us within 15 seconds that the deal we have made as a nation with Goldman is under-priced by many, many orders of magnitude and that we are insane.

Goldmans hurriedly repaid the $US10 billion (with interest) earlier this year, which, according to a company spokesperson, netted the US government a 23% annual return. More importantly though, repaying TARP allowed Goldmans to avoid regulation of its remuneration practices by Obama’s pay tsar, Kenneth Feinberg.

The second way in which Goldmans has benefited from the American taxpayer has been through its conversion to a “bank holding company” — this has allowed Goldman to access the Fed’s “discount window”. The window was traditionally reserved for commercial banks to allow them to continue lending, not necessarily for what were once dubbed “merchant banks”, who make a substantial proportion of their earnings from trading on their own account (also known as “proprietary trading”).

Bloomberg noted that one of the ramifications of allowing Goldmans to become a holding bank has been to lower its interest bill from $US26.1 billion in 2008 to only $US5.2 billion this year. This did not impress Harvard professor and acclaimed author, Niall Fergusson, who stated, “you can’t give a small group of firms this privilege, where they get free money from the Fed and a taxpayer guarantee and they can run the biggest hedge fund in the world.”

Investment banker Peter Solomon took a similar view, telling Bloomberg that:

The issue that people have focused on — TARP and the payback of TARP money — is insignificant compared with the way they’ve been able to use federally guaranteed programs and their access to the Fed window …

… Everybody thinks they’re a bank, but they’re a hedge fund … The difference is that this year they’re using your money to do it.

Then there is the fact that while no one has ever said it, Goldman’s is almost clearly too big to fail — and that the US government (which is infiltrated with Goldmanites) would never let the bank collapse regardless of how crazy its activities were (and in fairness, Goldmans has been far more responsible than most of its competitors). During the height of the banking crisis in September 2008, despite explicitly promising not to contact Goldman, Treasury Secretary (and Goldman’s most recent past-CEO) Hank Paulson spoke with Goldman CEO Blankfein on 24 separate occasions. Shortly after, AIG was rescued and Goldman was the major beneficiary — pocketing $US13 billion.

Bloomberg noted Sean Egan, founder of Egan-Jones Ratings, who stated that “we’re in the business of doing credit analysis, and we’ve come to the conclusion that essentially Goldman Sachs is backstopped”. Much like Fannie and Freddie — Goldman’s can operate with the knowledge that if all goes wrong, the US taxpayer will be there with a very large chequebook.

Until then, Goldmans would be crazy to not make as much hay as it can while the sun continues to shine. And by making hay, we mean paying its very smart employees billions of dollars to take calculated risks with shareholder and taxpayer money.