I know it’s a cliché, but at the moment I can’t think of another phrase besides the headline of this piece that would so aptly describe how seldom I find myself agreeing with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Yet, here we are on April 15 and, sure enough, the moon is an amazing shade of cerulean blue!

The point of agreement with the Journal?  Goldman Sachs.  And I have to admit the firm is turning into a pet peeve of mine.  I just can’t get past the feeling that due to its many friends in high places the former investment banking giant has gotten some really sweet treatment as the economic crisis has unfolded.

Here’s where I found myself agreeing with the Journal: “The point is that Goldman and other banks can’t have it both ways.  If they want taxpayers to save them, then they have to take fewer risks and become smaller.  Either that, or we need a new financial resolution or bankruptcy process that lets these companies fail while protecting the larger banking system.”

Goldman has made a big point of how it is just itching to repay the $10 billion in bailout funds it got from the government last year.  It’s feeling particularly flush now that it has successfully pulled off a $5 billion stock sale.

Actually, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s about $13 billion flusher than it might otherwise have been if the same government that gave it $10 billion last fall hadn’t also made it whole on some transactions with AIG.  Yes, whole, as in 100% of the risk Goldman took was covered. 

As the Journal points out, a similar situation back in 2008 “involving Merrill Lynch and XL Capital Assurance resulted in Merrill receiving 13 cents on the dollar, not the 100 cents Goldman received.”

Now that Goldman is a bank holding company instead of an investment bank, it is riding the government gravy train in other ways.  As the Journal’s editorial put it: “Meanwhile, Goldman also has access to the Fed’s discount window, as it didn’t before the 2008 Bear Stearns rescue.  And Goldman has benefited from the FDIC’s debt-guarantee program, which means it can borrow money at cheaper rates.”

If Goldman repaid the $10 billion of TARP money to the feds, then it would be rid of those nasty restrictions on executive compensation that the government demanded as one of the conditions of getting the TARP money.   But it would still have access to cheap funds from the government, as the Journal noted.

Now, having your cake and eating it too (having it both ways) is an American tradition going back to the origins of the Republic, so I’m not going to knock it.  Let’s face it. There’s a large part of our nature that takes to the concept as cozily as sinking into a warm bath.

But it’s also part of human nature to get really annoyed when it’s some other guy who is able to stuff his face with the cake simply because he’s got big powerful friends who take good care of him. 

That’s a crumby deal for the rest of us-no matter how you cut the cake.   And even more so if you’re the one paying for the cake!

Flash to Congress:  You, our esteemed representatives, are not supposed to be the ones brandishing the pitchforks.  In fact, the scariest times are those cases where public outrage sparks you enough so that you go into one of your periodic lemming-like frenzies, becoming in the process a spectacle providing nothing so much as comic relief.

Beyond this, the comic relief was the solution that the House came up with and for which it voted overwhelmingly-tax those bonuses at the rate of 90%.  I can’t be the only one, and I know I’m not, who finds this so ridiculous and cartoonish that it has trimmed even the already scant respect I have for Congress by a few more degrees.

I will admit that I too was outraged when the news of the bonuses broke in the New York Times and crashed on the steps of Capitol Hill in the days after.   But I have to say I was even more disheartened by what came in its wake.

The circus that followed is symptomatic of what ails this country.  So many people, and that includes politicians, would rather be swept away by a diversion than deal with what we need to do to get back on track.  In this, the public is ably abetted by the mainstream media, which is only too happy to go chasing after the easy stories if they’ll raise ratings or sell more copies.

These diversions often revolve around either a scapegoat or someone being unduly idolized.  No doubt about it, AIG has become the scapegoat for the financial mess we’re in.  In particular, the financial products unit is seen as the crucible of the ongoing debacle, so when the retention bonuses came to light and so many, if not all, of them were for employees of the financial products unit, well, it was, as they say, a perfect storm.  Of diversion.

Now, it’s true that $165 million is a lot of money.  But it pales in comparison to the amounts received by firms who were made whole in deals they had with AIG, and at taxpayers’ expense.  To me, what really stinks far more than the $165 million is the $12.9 billion that Goldman Sachs has received from AIG’s tens of billions of bailout funds.  Or the $6.8 billion Merrill Lynch got.  Or the nearly $12 billion each that’s been shelled out to France’s Societe Generale and Germany’s Deutsche Bank.

According to reports, these big trading partners of AIG were made whole on deals they had with AIG with nary a hint of factoring in any discount in the settlement.  So, in essence, while they may have taken really risky bets, these well-connected financial companies did not have to pay any price at all for losing on those bets in the end.  We, the taxpayers, made them whole through the bailout funds shoveled to AIG.  No wonder there was such secrecy around the whole situation for months, and only when the pressure got really intense, were the names of these trading partners divulged.

Where’s your outrage over this, Congress?  And where’s the media?

Now we hear that poor Goldman Sachs, which took some $10 billion in TARP funds last year, is upset and simply chafing to give it back so that the era of huge bonuses for its partners can resume.  You know what, Goldman, before we taxpayers let you return the $10 billion, we should insist you also give back a big chunk of the $12.9 billion.  

Now that’s something I could pick up a pitchfork for!   To the castle!

At this point the Financial Accounting Standards Board is probably experiencing what I’d call the Bristol Palin effect.  That’s to say that once you’ve been shown to lose your virginity in a very public way, you can talk all you want about the virtue of abstinence but no one’s going to put much credence in what you have to say.

FASB, the outfit that sets financial and accounting rules for companies, including insurers, has always had a reputation for chastity when it came to rule-making.  We don’t care how strong the hormonal pressure coming from outside is, FASB seemed to say, we’re not going to even give the appearance of looking like we gave in.  We have a reputation to uphold.

That was then. 

Now, FASB has to come to terms with the irrefutable fact that you only lose your virginity once.

Years back, FASB approved, after a seemingly endless period of deliberation, the mark-to-market rule that is causing such havoc in the financial markets now, especially in the banking sector, when the value of assets is tanking all over the place. 

Mark-to-market means banks and others have to value the assets on their books for what they’re worth now.  It’ll come as no surprise to you that these assets-mortgages, mortgage-backed securities and their ilk-have seen their value drop precipitously.  Thus, the tremendous hits that financial institutions have had to take on their balance sheets and the spreading, deepening pain as the recession marches on.

Needless to say, when assets seem to see their value growing daily, as they did just a few years ago, mark-to-market is oh so satisfying.  Especially if you’re an executive whose bonus is tied to the growing value of those assets and the revenue they produce in spinoffs of one kind or another.  It’s just human nature.

But now that the value of assets on banks’ and insurers’ books is plummeting, the mirror image of the formerly positive side of human nature kicks in.  Banks don’t like mark-to-market now.  And banks have powerful friends in Congress and government.

These powerful friends started to exert some pressure on FASB a few months ago to give in on mark-to-market.  For a while, FASB held its ground.  After all, it had always taken forever to make up its mind anyway. 

Then in the last month or so, the pressure grew really intense as the mayhem on companies’ books ratcheted ever higher.  The friends in high places got really pushy. FASB, finally, could not take the heat.  It put out a lighter rule for comment, gave the potential commenters a mere couple of weeks (instead of months or years) to do their thing and then, no surprise, eased mark-to-market in a way that gave the banks and other companies much more discretion as to how they could value their assets.

That’s to say the banks now don’t have to assign the current value to assets that are in the toilet.  They can use their judgment and if they think the asset will have a higher value in the future, then that is the value they can report.

You don’t have to be a genius to guess how banks are going to start valuing their assets.  Of course this asset is worth much more than what it could currently bring in the market, so that’s the value we’re going to assign it. 

The problem with this is that the same lack of transparency that got us into this situation would now be applied to the detritus scattered all across the country.  How is anyone to really know what the true value of assets on a company’s books is if those assets can be assigned a value based on wishful thinking?

FASB should have stuck to its guns.  Sure, there is a lot of pain and still more to come.  But at least it was based on some kind of reality, the reality of the market now, not in some future la-la land. 

Now when the subject of FASB’s credibility comes up, all it’s going to be is remembrance of things past.  And never to be retrieved.  Just like you know what…