Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) received billions in bailout money from its former CEO turned Treasury Secretary -- both directly and through the bailout of American International Group (NYSE: AIG).

But in response to criticism, Goldman remains defiant, insisting that it never had a problem; if it did have a problem it would have taken care of it; and there was no need to do anything about a problem anyway. Goldman president Gary D. Cohn told The New York Times that "We did not have a near-death experience," and added that the government saved the financial industry as a whole but did not save Goldman Sachs.

Update: Many readers and other people who have seen this quote making the rounds on Wall Street believe it is a hoax.

Hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson sends out wonderful e-mails about every day. I just got a new one today, and he included this incredible quote from Karl Marx:

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. (Das Kapital, 1867)

What does it all mean? I'm not really sure. But Karl Marx's theory that capitalism would inevitably lead to communism has mostly been dismissed -- proven wrong by the survival of capitalism and the fall of communism.

And while it is true that there was a fat lady singing at Obama's inauguration (she was great by the way -- just sayin'), Karl Marx may still have the last word yet.

Of course some Republicans will point to Obama as a step toward socialism. So does that mean Marx was right?

A DealBook piece looks at David Einhorn's very public battles with Allied Capital (NYSE: ALD) and Lehman Bros. (NYSE: LEH), both of which he is short and accused of accounting chicanery. Einhorn's willingness to "talk his book" has generated controversy. Steven Davidoff writes that "Many short plays are enhanced through rumor and innuendo spread by those self-same shorts. Needless to say, these whispers are sometimes unfounded but can do real harm to a company's share price and the company itself."

In his email newsletter, fund manager Whitney Tilson slams this comment: "Hmmm... How many is "many"? More than one? A majority? 99% of the rumor and innuendo in the market I see is on the long side! The shorts I know, on the other hand, perhaps because they're often falsely accused of spreading "rumor and innuendo", bend over backwards to be open and factual."

This is exactly the point. What is the ratio of "pumps" to "bashes"? When Einhorn goes on CNBC and trashes a stock, it's a national story. That's because it's incredibly rare for anyone to go on CNBC and slam a company. The extent of the skepticism we usually hear in the financial media is "overvalued" or "tough prospects."

So I say to Einhorn and Co.: Keep doing what you're doing. Differing opinions, and especially unpopular ones, make for a better market.

Like most investors, I think that one of the most important factors when evaluating a potential investment is the quality of management: You are entrusting them with your hard-earned money in the hope that they can earn higher returns with it than you can by yourself. But I often struggle with evaluating management. The first thing I look at it insider ownership and executive compensation. But couldn't a bad executive own a lot of stock in a company? And does the fact that a CEO appears to be overpaid mean he's bad? And aren't there plenty of executives who make comparably little, but deserve even less? And the past-performance of the stock can be misleading too. Which factors were out of the CEO's control? In the case of Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), the stock has performed poorly since Lee Scott took the reigns as a result of multiple consolidation. The stock was overvalued when he was hired, but does that make him bad?

Fund manager and columnist Whitney Tilson has an amazing column in the weekend's Financial Times, where he collects some of the greatest wisdom on evaluating managers from a handful of great investors.

I would urge all investors to read Tilson's column, and I would throw in another one of my favorite quotes about management.

When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. -Warren Buffett

Strong management is one the sine qua non's (Special thanks to Mr. Metzger, my high school Latin teacher) of a strong investment, but it almost never compensates for a bad business.

Sometimes there is an article in a newspaper that's so great that it's worth doing a post on just so that more people will see it, and no additional commentary is really necessary. Whitney Tilson's tips for value investors in these weekend's Financial Times is such a piece.

For the uninitiated, Whitney Tilson is one of the great value investing minds of our time. He's also a heck of a good guy: He's one of the founders of Teach For America, and I'm an eager reader of anything that he has to say.

For more information about how to implement the investment strategies discussed in his latest column, I recommend the following books:

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits. If there's an award for the most informative book with a clunky, annoying title, I nominate this Joel Greenblatt masterpiece. It's focused on special situations such as spin-offs and bankruptcy investing, which are both featured in Tilson's list of tips.

Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation. Whether you like it or not, almost all value investing seems to have a contrarian angle: You're buying stocks that you think the market is pricing inaccurately. David Dreman makes a compelling case for contrarian investing, and shows how you might be able to beat the market.

The Power 30 is Smart Money's November 2006 cover story. It features Warren Buffett and touts the magazine's list of 30 people you could learn from. There is no doubt you could learn from many of these brilliant economic minds. However, Smart Money did not choose to do much more than simply identify them. There was almost nothing to learn unless you wanted to know what they were currently reading. This story would have been better placed in People magazine than Smart Money.

For example, Whitney Tilson, Founder, T2 Partners is listed as having a large following among value investors. They mention him starting his investment fund at age 32 and doubling his investors' money in just seven years. BIG DEAL, I say. They must be joking. No offense to Mr. Tilson, but the average market return is 10% so doubling your investment in seven years is basically an average showing -- minus his fees and subscription costs, it might even be worse than the average.

Here is my Power List -- six glaring omissions of people left off the list that I think matter much more than some that made the cut:

• Alan Abelson, lead editorial writer for Barron's who is quick to point out market fallacies with an astute and well-read high level of cogitation. He gives you something to think about every week.
• James Cramer, of the Street.com and NBC fame who has a following that long ago passed ten's of millions of readers, listeners, watchers and Wall Streeters. He may not always be right, but he is very influential.
• Bill Gates, of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) fame, the wealthiest man in the world and largest philanthropist with his finger on the pulse of many worlds, I need not say more.
• Alan Greenspan may not be sitting on his Federal Reserve perch these days but when he speaks the world is listening. If he were to change his manner of expression to one of more specific and harsh tone you would not want to be holding the stock or bond he was trashing.
• Charlie Munger is a titan in the investment world and has had the ear of Warren Buffett for several decades. If Buffett is listening, you and I should be listening.
• Ken Heebner of the CGM Funds is one of those guys you would pay to have lunch with and has a track Record that makes some of the others seem like novices, for some real insights read this.

There are easily another fifty that deserve mention. Next time Smart Money, please give us some information we can use and not more lists. I get something valuable from every issue of Smart Money, but this story was not it.

Interested in reading more? Check out my other posts for Blogging Stocks here.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the vice president for Design and Research of an Architecture & Planning firm.