IF ONLY financial journalists would dish out more insults as good as a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, business columns might suddenly seem so much more interesting.
Alas, the world must turn to its music magazine writers, such as Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, for the really colourful stuff when it comes to describing financial titans such as Goldman Sachs, The Herald Sun reports.
Mr Taibbi, who until now was best known for covering the 2004 election and a 2005 column entitled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope", used the flashy phrase when he took it to the Wall Street giant in a recent edition of Rolling Stone titled The Great American Bubble Machine.
But much more shocking than Mr Taibbi's well-crafted paragraphs about Goldman Sachs engineering every great market event since the Great Depression, and running the US Government, was the reaction by the normally tight-lipped firm.
Instead of ignoring an article that accused it of rigging the booms in internet stocks, oil prices and mortgage-backed bonds alongside a cover of the Jonas Brothers, Goldman went running to Wall Street's favourite tabloid, the New York Post, to defend itself.
"(Mr Taibbi's) story is an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories," a furious Goldman spokesman, Lucas Van Praag, emailed the Post.
"Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter (in John F. Kennedy's assassination) and faking the first lunar landing.
"We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good."
Mr Taibbi, it appears, would not be chastened and responded to Goldman's accusation that he was a conspiracy nut by doing what all good conspiracy theorists do - he blogged about it.
"Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the US Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows," Mr Taibbi fumed on the Rolling Stone website. "They have the ear of the President if they want it."
While the music magazine writer also produced a fairly entertaining online video outlining how Goldman alumni rule the world, he did little to back himself up.
Unfortunately for Mr Taibbi - whose gifts of prose cannot be underestimated - his entire thesis was large on colour and sparse on new facts.
Thanks to reporters at The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the New York Post, we already knew Goldman Sachs alumni had positions in governments and influential bodies around the world.
We also knew that the firm was the biggest contributor to Barack Obama's presidential run and that key members of its management and board were at the sides of Hank Paulson (another alum) and Timothy Geithner (another alum) throughout the financial crisis.
We also knew that Goldman Sachs profited more than any other bank during the sub-prime mortgage mess and that it sold out of its positions before the downturn hit hard.
We also knew that the company had been part of talks about whether to keep its competitor Lehman Brothers afloat.
Unlike Mr Taibbi, we knew all of this - and didn't think it amounted to sinister conspiracy. Instead we thought this is what the biggest guy on The Street does.
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