It appears that last week's story about senior bankers at Goldman Sachs arming themselves with handguns to fend off a "populist uprising" was just that: a story. Reporting for Bloomberg News, Alice Schroeder wrote, "New York Police Department has told me that ‘as a preliminary matter’ it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits." But now NYPD spokesman Paul J. Browne tells the Wall Street Journal that only four Goldman employees have applied for gun permits in recent years — and the last application, submitted by the firm’s head of security, was made in 2003. Basically, they're sitting ducks over there!

Schroeder's been laying low since her anecdotal report first captured the zeitgeist. Browne maintains, "We haven’t seen a surge of applications of any kind for Goldman Sachs employees," and a spokesman for the bank says, "The story to us seemed to be the product of a very fertile imagination." So, to be clear, the senior banksters at Goldman Sachs—that infamous "vampire squid sucking the face of humanity"—are most likely not capable of opening fire on a bloodthirsty mob, should such a mob ever get its shit together.