No matter how powerful a supervillain, his function is to be beaten by the superhero. When that happens too often, the writer needs to increase the threat level if he is to maintain any tension. The best solution is to bring together an alliance of supervillains. So Ian Fleming set up SPECTRE and DC Comics founded the Injustice Gang.

The same logic may be behind Goldman Sachs’ teaming up with Facebook. The only thing they have in common is that they are ideal casting for supervillains. Goldman Sachs is the Darth Vader of international banking, unpopular even by the standards of post-2008 banks, and Facebook’s founder was recently the subject of an amazingly unsympathetic portrayal in a hit film.

It is hard to think of another explanation for Goldman Sachs’ $450 million investment in Facebook – itself based on the bank’s optimistic valuation of the social networking company, which it says is worth over $50 billion.

True, most sector analysts agree that there is still a lot of scope for market growth, and Facebook is now placed to all but monopolise its expanding market. However, if recent history has taught us anything, it is that there are no guarantees in the dot.com business. Facebook was itself built on the graves of Friends Reunited and My Space.

The essential weakness of dot.com companies is that their valuation is often based on no more than wishful thinking. In some cases that optimism proves justified. In most it does not. Customer goodwill is an intangible asset, one that often proves fleeting, even where it really exists.

Some dot.com firms, like Google, have backed up their online presence with more tangible assets, most notably in the form of intellectual property rights. However, Facebook has nothing tangible that justifies anything like that $50 billion price its new best friends have put on it.

So it is hard to fathom out why the usually conservative Goldman Sachs is being so generous. One explanation is that the bankers are betting that Facebook will be allowed to take over other major online players, possibly including Twitter, and are prepared to bankroll the construction of a huge online conglomerate. The other explanation is that there is underground lair somewhere where Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are sitting around a large table with the CEOs of Halliburton, Starbucks, Microsoft, BP, and Disney, plotting to take over the world in the name of evil.

These two explanations are by no means mutually exclusive.

When it comes to political parties, this blog has a certain instinctive sympathy with the words Shakespeare put into the mouth of a man dying in a pointless faction fight: “A plague on both your houses!”

So we are not being partisan, merely stating an objectively verifiable fact, when we say that much of what is called, rather optimistically, the “business community” does not feel that it has received much sympathy and understanding from the current White House. At the same time, the Obama Administration is frustrated by the slow pace of job generation by the private sector.

These two facts are obviously connected.

However, following his party’s defeat in November’s Congressional elections, the President has expressed a desire to build some bridges. He held a high-profile meeting with 20 selected CEOs, supposedly representing that elusive “business community”. He also agreed with his Republican opponents a compromise on extending Bush-era tax cuts which has now passed the Senate.

So far, so good, but only time will tell if this represents a real change of direction. The CEO meeting was obviously cosmetic, with the President urging the businessmen to invest their surplus money without giving them any new reason to do so. Needless to say, small business was not represented at the meeting.

Meanwhile, with far more fanfare, the same Obama Administration has initiated massive litigation against BP, suing them for just about everything imaginable over the Gulf oil spill. BP certainly ought to be (and is) paying compensation to a lot of people, but endangering a legitimate business by claiming unlimited damages is all about politics, not justice.

The Federal Government is responding to, perhaps even stirring up the same lynch mob mentality we noted in our previous post, on the Madoff case. In doing that, it is also distracting attention from its own culpability in the Gulf disaster. It is particularly hypocritical that the lawsuit blames BP for not using the latest equipment – since when has the Government ever done that?

The message is clear: the Administration is backing business – except when it’s not.