Perhaps the Goldman gang's best claim to savvy was in buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages and packaging them into mortgage backed securities, and more complex derivative instruments, and selling them all over the world. Blankfein and Goldman earned tens of billions of dollars on these deals. The great trick was that many of the loans put into these securities were issued by banks filling in phony information so that borrowers could get loans that they would not be able to repay. But this was not Goldman's concern. They made money on the packaging and the selling of the securities.
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This triumvirate somehow managed to convince Congress that we would have a second Great Depression if it didn't cough up the money [$700 billion] immediately with no conditions [Paulson's famous one-page proposal]. At that point Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and most of the other major banks were staring at bankruptcy. While this cascade of bank failures would have been bad news for the economy, there was no plausible scenario in which it would have led to a second Great Depression.
Oh, and Goldman Sachs also apparently hacked an online poll asking if perhaps the country shouldn't charge a $0.05 tax on financial transactions. Goldman Sachs declared that they were shocked, shocked I tell you, and that "Yeah, I think they're going to join O.J. Simpson in looking for the perpetrators!"
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