Goldfellas
Business of protection
Vampire shark
Orange jump-suits anyone?
Those in the investment banking business – outside of Goldman Sachs, that is – have quietly enjoyed the fact that Goldman has some how managed to attract all the regulatory and political heat over the past year or so.
Here was a bank that didn’t go bust; that was last on the list of the speculators’ shorts back in the frenzied days of September 2008; that could go to investors (rather than the government) for capital. This is the bank that “won” the credit crisis.
But now the same bank has placed itself at the epicenter of all that is wrong in finance.
Goldman is the butt of prime-time TV jokesters, the subject of a Justice Department probe, home of the banksters, a lightening rod for anti-capitalists, a danger to the American public.
Merrill Lynch downgraded Goldman stock to “neutral” earlier on Friday.
Neutral? Try “FAIL.”
The risk for the banking sector as a whole is that we now get rampant reputational contagion.
Was Goldman a badder bank than other banks? No.
Did other firms put their own free-wheeling interests before those of their clients? Yes.
Is Goldman now a victim of its own, home-grown, blinding arrogance? Absolutely.
Lloyd Blankfein, now the public face of Wall Street, not just his own firm, passed up the chance to offer an open act of contrition earlier in the week when appearing in front of Carl Levin’s subcommittee on Capitol Hill.
For that alone he should now be fired.
Don’t listen to us. Listen to the market:
Related links:
Abacus – posts 1-34
US prosecutors to review Goldman case – FT