It did help. The reason was that GS was able to run the models and pricing on the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) they held, unlike other firms. CDOs are

It did help. The reason was that GS was able to run the models and pricing on the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) they held, unlike other firms. CDOs are made up of a collection of asset backed securities, and even running a cashflow model, prepayment model and interest rate model on each of those individually can take up to 10 seconds (Sorry for the financial terms). On top of that, there's thing called OAS (option adjusted spread) which is a type of Monte Carlo simulations and quite intensive. A lot of places were not able to properly price their CDOs due to the intensive nature of the calculations but Goldman could. To be honest, Buffett's interest in Goldman and his friendship with Obama could have had some play in the government's interaction with them. The real issue here, is that all the models and ratings on these securities did not correlate the failure of similar bonds with similar underlying collateral. When running the models, they had something like 10% cross correlation between different bonds with extremely similar collateral according to someone who used to work at Fitch. In reality it should have been something like 50 to 75%.