> Goldman Sachs and McKinsey put out a lot of free research because this thoughtful leadership help establish them as an authority for their main business.

That is, those departments are the advertising and PR branches for their main businesses. How can I trust the veracity of their claims knowing that their ultimate goal is to give me a favorable opinion of their parent organizations? This is the exact problem news organizations have always faced, but in the past attempted to counter with different sources of income and spreading advertising income between many clients.

What we have here is the equivalent of a technology newspaper fully owned and subsidized by Oracle. How much should I trust their assessment of different RDBMS systems? Should I trust articles in Facebook's equivalent that are telling me that all the concern over React's license are overblown?

Reputation and honest signaling.

In general, or are you implying that I should trust Goldman Sachs because of their reputation and honest signalling? Because if it's the latter, the company as a whole has a lot to answer for reputation wise[1], regardless of how this division has behaved. I'm not sure I would be able to overlook what appears to be a company management and culture problem of that degree and believe it would leave other divisions entirely unaffected.

1: http://fortune.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-doj-settlement/