Recently, through strange circumstances, I have become an incredibly wealthy person.

It was not always so. Not long ago, I was an impoverished freelance magazine writer, contributing articles to this very magazine on the subject of snuff and hangover cures and sword canes. It sounds horrible, I know, but do not judge. Back then, it was the only way I could afford a sword cane.

But now, of course, I am an accidental famous minor television personality. Now I have dozens of custom-made sword canes, and even some that are not even canes—just plain swords that I use as canes, because I am that incredibly wealthy. Plus tudos, decent dress shoes, that expensive cat food you never buy—everything.

My life is completely different, and I have insight now to a whole new world of privilege, excess, and unaccountable influence over the government that is hidden from you, because you are poor.

Take, for example, the case of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which has been in the news lately for posting massive profits in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis that cost millions of Americans their homes and jobs and caused competing banks, such as Lehman Brothers, to spontaneously combust in eerie blue flame.

Naturally, people have questions about this mysterious institution, and here are some of them, with answers provided by me.

What is Goldman Sachs?

Goldman Sachs is an investment bank founded in 1869 with the simple goal of providing short-term loans to local businesses and to secretly run the U.S. government.

Do they secretly run the U.S. government?

No. Goldman Sachs abandoned that part of its charter after commissioning the Great Depression, when the Goldman board (also known as the Council of the Invisible Hand) determined that the day-to-day work of governance—taxation, defense, figuring out how to keep impoverished children from dying in the streets, hobo fighting, etc. —was boring.

Since then, the Invisible Hand has been content to simply keep a few highly placed agents within the government to make sure it does not get in the way.

Who are these agents?

It's not a secret: Robert Rubin, Clinton's secretary of the treasury, and Henry Paulson, George W. Bush's, were both heads of Goldman and both occasionally wore the powder blue robes and silvery face paint that is the sign of their office. Timothy Geithner, the current treasury secretary, is not a Goldman alum, but he is a protégé of Rubin's (the two have been known to go clubbing together), and Geithner's chief of staff is a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist.