This gratuitous little comment piece is pinging round the financial blogosphere, for obvious reasons. From Alice Schroeder at Bloomberg:
“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.
We didn’t bother calling Mr van Praag, because we are pretty sure he is now following the standard PR strategy for a bank in Goldman’s predicament, which is to shut the f up.
Then, at some point, this sort of public hanging by apocrypha will die out. Maybe.
Upon the gun anecdote, Ms Schroeder goes on to hang former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson (“a former Goldman Sachs CEO”) for letting slip during congressional testimony last summer that he feared that if we had complete meltdown “it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system:”
There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.
But before you toss this aside as a piece of populist invective, get this: Ms Schroeder is a former managing director at Goldman’s great rival, Morgan Stanley.
And if that’s not enough Goldman-baiting/bashing for you, visit Vanity Fair, where a former Goldman trader, Beth McLean, devotes 8,500 words to the subject…
Related posts:
Are we witnessing contagion of outrage? – FT Alphaville
Goldman Sachs abandons kittens (really) – FT Alphaville
Goldman Sachs saves kittens (really) – FT Alphaville