Is this “defence” of telecom shill Jack Grubman from Forbes.com an inspired parody of bubble-era thinking, or a perfect example of the real thing. I’ve quoted it in part, with the best bits italicised. You decide!

Jack’s praise was not based on nothing. It was based on research! But many people misunderstand the nature of research. Jack didn’t ask whether the company was likely to be profitable. He asked whether the share price was likely to rise. And to know that, he had to know the thinking of the very same institutional investors who so admired him.

Nowadays, everyone is all over Jack because he had friends in the industry, especially Bernard Ebbers, who invited Jack to WorldCom board meetings. A few years ago having friends was a good thing. They called it being connected.

Now they’re calling the same thing a conflict of interest. But as Jack himself once said, “What used to be a conflict is now a synergy. …Objective? The other word for it is uninformed.”

Jack caused synergies for his employer, too. He didn’t just stand to the side and predict where stocks would go. He helped make it happen by encouraging telecom companies to sign up to have Salomon sell their IPOs. Some estimates say Salomon earned $1 billion in investment banking fees from the industry.

If Salomon paid Jack $20 million a year, it wasn’t because he predicted well. Nor was it because he had the good looks or the winning personality of other bankers. It was because the bank believed he helped generate those fees. His ability to generate fees was a direct result of investors’ belief in him. Somewhere along the way–around the same time that the telecom industry lost perhaps $2 trillion in market value–people stopped believing.

So let’s not blame Jack for causing the fall of telecom. If they still believed in Jack the way they once did, the fall never would have happened.