Last week, John Byrne of Raw Story made a big deal about a stock sale by Goldman Sachs in the first quarter of 2010.

The headline blares “Goldman Sachs sold $250 million of BP stock before spill“.

The bold face teaser breathlessly adds: “Firm’s stock sale nearly twice as large as any other institution; Represented 44 percent of total BP investment”.

I’m guessing that if you can come up with a story that includes both Goldman Sachs and BP as key subjects or objects or whatever, you’ve hit search-engine gold. Because nothing else explains why Raw Story published this absurdly misconceived story.

According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman’s sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP’s stock during the quarter.

If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value (sic), or $96 million. The share sales represented 44 percent of Goldman’s holdings — meaning that Goldman’s remaining holdings have still lost tens of millions in value.

(“According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found”? Even before RawStory.com published their story, there was already a regulatory filing which described what their intrepid analysts had found? Maybe that’s the real story here: the Obama administration is secretly regulating blogs, which are required to submit filings of everything they find out before publication, and that’s just a short step away from blog censorship, isn’t it?)

So why is this a story exactly?

Goldman Sachs used to own roughly 0.33% of BP’s shares. Last quarter, they happened to sell almost half those shares. That was more than any other firm sold that quarter. And then, lo and behold, soon thereafter the Deepwater Horizon oil rig went kaboom, killing 11 people and unleashing the biggest oil spill this country has ever suffered.

This would be a story if and only if one there was probable cause to suspect one of the following:
• For nefarious reasons yet unknown, BP engineered the disaster, and tipped off Goldman Sachs in advance. (So as not to draw too much attention to themselves, BP sold only half their shares, and did no shortselling or dabbling in BP stock options.)
• Goldman Sachs paid persons yet unknown to cause the oil-rig explosion, in order to profit from the resulting price plunge, but because they have been brain-dead with panic ever since the SEC decided to go after them for fraud, they did no shortselling or dabbling in BP stock options, and sold just half their shares.)

But not even RawStory.com‘s intrepid reporters and editors want to make any such suggestion. So why the story? This tepid rationalization that said reporters and editors offer in their own defense is their entire justification for running the story:

The sale and its size itself isn’t unusual for a large asset management firm. Wall Street brokerages routinely buy and sell huge blocks of shares for themselves and their clients. In light of a recent SEC lawsuit arguing that Goldman kept information about a product they sold from their clients, however, the stock sale may raise fresh concern among Goldman’s critics.

Really? Raise fresh concern among Goldman’s critics on what basis exactly?