"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
That was how Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi introduced his article on Goldman Sachs last year. There was something rather thrilling about the words, as if someone had finally told the full truth about the banks. Every generation has its own blind spot about moral outrage. In the eighteenth century, it was slavery. At the beginning of the twenty-first, it seems to me to be financial services - the huge and inflationary rewards, the corrosion of the real economy.
To celebrate the occasion, my colleagues at the new economics foundation have released a short animation about the vampire squid, and I thoroughly recommend it:
http://www.neweconomics.org/press-releases/who-will-tame-the-giant-vampire-squid
Green MP Caroline Lucas has tabled an early day motion in the Commons drawing attention to it, and three Lib Dems have signed already (Leech, Russell, Hancock).
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