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I say this as someone who is most certainly not a Goldman conspiracy theorist. I do not believe that Goldman is a “vampire squid” that has been at the root of every financial crisis since the Depression, as Rolling Stone magazine claimed a few months ago. I don’t believe that Henry Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary, saved the American International Group because he was really trying to save Goldman Sachs  even if he was Goldman’s former chief executive. (I think he did it to prevent the financial system from collapsing completely.)

I don’t even believe that there was anything wrong with all the phone conversations Mr. Paulson had with Mr. Blankfein in the fall of 2008. It was a crisis, for crying out loud. During times of trouble, it makes perfect sense that you would talk to people with whom you’d shared a foxhole during past crises.

And I also think it is important to give the company its due: it is really good at what it does. “They went through the crisis like everyone else,” said Brad Hintz, the analyst who follows the firm for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “But they recovered faster and they didn’t make mistakes.” Mr. Hintz added that after Lehman went bankrupt, some 20 percent of the fixed-income market share was up for grabs. “Goldman was able to take advantage of that,” he said. “They were able to get their trades done.”

Image Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, being interviewed at the Fortune magazine breakfast on Oct. 16. Credit... Jemal Countess/Getty Images, for Time Magazine

Ah, yes, but why were they able to get their trades done? One reason is that Goldman had far more capital at its disposal than any other firm. In a market like this one  with interest rates so low they are practically negligible (which is itself a government policy that greatly aids Goldman Sachs), and with competitors either hobbled or out of business, capital is basically the only thing you need to make money hand over fist. That $10 billion of TARP money meant that Goldman Sachs could free up an additional $10 billion to put to work making money  instead of having to use it to shore up its capital. Indeed, when the firm paid back the TARP money last summer, it went out and raised new capital so that it wouldn’t have to reduce the amount it could deploy to make money.

In addition, early in the crisis, at a time when lending had essentially frozen, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation set up an emergency program to guarantee commercial paper loans. Like every other firm, Goldman took advantage of that program, borrowing $28 billion (it has since reduced that amount to $21 billion). Although that program is about to be eliminated, I saw an analysis in The Wall Street Journal recently showing that Goldman was likely to save around $754 million over the life of the guarantee program.

Then there was the fact that during their moment of maximum vulnerability, the government let Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs become bank holding companies  something it had earlier refused to allow Lehman Brothers to do. In practical terms, it wasn’t all that big a deal; it primarily meant the two firms were going to be regulated by the Federal Reserve rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission.