Matt Taibbi has laid what is probably his most exhaustive look into Goldman Sachs:

It wouldn’t be hard for federal or state prosecutors to use the Levin report to make a criminal case against Goldman. I ask Eliot Spitzer what he would do if he were still attorney general and he saw the Levin report. “Once the steam stopped coming out of my ears, I’d be dropping so many subpoenas,” he says. “And I would parse every potential inconsistency between the testimony they gave to Congress and the facts as we now understand them.”

I ask what inconsistencies jump out at him. “They keep claiming they were only marginally short, that it was more just servicing their clients,” he says. “But it sure doesn’t look like that.” He pauses. “They were $13 billion short. That’s big — 50 percent of their risk. It was so completely disproportionate.”

Lloyd Blankfein went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn’t make a massive short bet and didn’t bet against its clients. The Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a “big short” and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits. Are we all missing something? Is there some different and higher standard of triple- and quadruple-lying that applies to bank CEOs but not to baseball players?

This issue is bigger than what Goldman executives did or did not say under oath. The Levin report catalogs dozens of instances of business practices that are objectively shocking, no matter how any high-priced lawyer chooses to interpret them: gambling billions on the misfortune of your own clients, gouging customers on prices millions of dollars at a time, keeping customers trapped in bad investments even as they begged the bank to sell, plus myriad deceptions of the “failure to disclose” variety, in which customers were pitched investment deals without ever being told they were designed to help Goldman “clean” its bad inventory. For years, the soundness of America’s financial system has been based on the proposition that it’s a crime to lie in a prospectus or a sales brochure. But the Levin report reveals a bank gone way beyond such pathetic little boundaries; the collective picture resembles a financial version of The Jungle, a portrait of corporate sociopathy that makes you never want to go near a sausage again.

Again, read the whole piece. Taibbi has done some of the best reporting on the financial collapse broadly and the actions of Goldman Sachs specifically. Much of this article isn’t new information so much as a thoroughly accessible presentation of the case against Goldman. Taibbi is really bang the drum loudly for criminal prosecution of Goldman Sachs executives. I hope he gets it, but frankly I’m not optimistic.