Matt Taibbi, who used the phrase "vampire squid" when referring to Goldman Sachs in a 2009 Rolling Stone article, was not proud of his creation in an interview with Dealbook's Kevin Roose. "I’m getting a little worried that I’m going to have a squid on my gravestone," he said. "It’s clearly getting a little old, but it seems to not go away."

It's not like he hasn't come up with other turns of phrase: he recently called Rick Perry "a human price tag--Being There meets Left Behind" in a November RS profile. And he still uses variations of the squid phrase routinely on his Rolling Stone blog. But, as Dealbook noted, it's pretty hard to top the lede from the original story:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. 

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Erik Hayden