"Should his era be coming to a close, Blankfein will be remembered first for having seen the 142-year-old-firm through some of the most perilous months in its history. But he will also have the distinction of having allowed Goldman Sachs to become a symbol of everything wrong with banks, corporations, even capitalism itself. Over the past three years, Goldman Sachs has been accused of having its hand in innumerable sinister activities, including but not limited to being the driving force behind the collapse of AIG and the Greek economy, spurring a global food crisis, colluding with Qaddafi, hoarding the swine-flu vaccine, hogging the fryers at Shake Shack, and bamboozling its clients in order to pay out monster bonuses. Even the firm’s name has become cultural shorthand for banker greed. “If you’re going to try to convince people you care about things other than money,” Amy Poehler quipped on Saturday Night Live, “may I suggest you remove the words gold and sack from your name?”
Goldman’s status as a lightning rod is frustrating to the people who work there. In their minds, the firm is the least obvious culprit among the financial institutions who attended the cheap-credit party. It did not issue faulty mortgages, or foreclose on people’s homes, or raise interest on credit cards, or jack up debit-card fees on consumers. Sure, it bought and sold the debt from those consumers, facilitated the sale of some of their bad debt to clients—but those were sophisticated investors, corporations, pension funds, extremely wealthy individuals. “We’re not saints,” one executive at the firm told me. “But we didn’t cause the crisis”....................READ MORE
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