This morning Crikey consulted this slide show presented by The Wall Street Journal – a timeline of the 141-year-old investment bank Goldman Sachs. We started at 1869, the year Goldman was founded “as a small commercial paper deal operating in a one-room office on Pine Street”, past the firm’s survival of the Great Depression, skimmed the ’80s and ’90s as Goldman went global and then skipped forward to 2007:

December 2007: Goldman reports a record profit of $11.6 billion on revenue of $45.99 billion, on the heels of the credit and housing booms.

September 2008: With the financial crisis intensifying, Goldman becomes a bank holding company, entitling it to greater government protection.

Fall 2008: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York agrees to pay Goldman and other firms 100 cents on the dollar for its trading position with American International Group.

September 2008: Warren Buffett invests $5 billion in Goldman Sachs.

October 2008: The government buys $10 billion worth of preferred shares from Goldman as part of TARP.

January 2010: Goldman reports a record profit of $13.39 billion. The firm sets aside $16.19 billion for compensation, or 35.8 per cent of its net revenue for compensation and benefits, about $3 billion less than expected.

In other words:

“A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” – Matt Taibbi, The Great American Bubble Machine, Rolling Stone, July 2009

Over to you, SEC…