On Goldman Executive Greg Smith's Brave Departure. Goldman sachs. Public Exit From Goldman Raises Doubt Over a New Ethic. Goldman Sachs e-mails show bank sought to profit from housing do. As the U.S. housing market began its epic fall nearly three years ago, top executives at Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs cheered the large financial gains the firm stood to make on certain bets it had placed, according to newly released documents.
The documents show that the firm's executives were celebrating earlier investments calculated to benefit if housing prices fell, a Senate investigative committee found. In an e-mail sent in the fall of 2007, for example, Goldman executive Donald Mullen predicted a windfall because credit-rating companies had downgraded mortgage-related investments, which caused losses for investors. "Sounds like we will make some serious money," Mullen wrote.
Goldman admits it had reduced its exposure to the overheated U.S. property market and had sought to limit possible losses through a strategy that would make money if home prices fell. Obama sharply rebuked Wall Street in his radio address Saturday.
Public Rebuke of Culture at Goldman Opens Debate. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg NewsLloyd C.
Blankfein, front, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Gary D. Cohn, its president. Until early Wednesday morning, Greg Smith was a largely anonymous 33-year-old midlevel executive at Goldman Sachs in London. Now everyone at the firm — and on Wall Street — knows his name. Mr. What the e-mail didn’t say was that about 15 minutes later, an Op-Ed article he had written detailing his criticisms was to be published in The New York Times.
The Op-Ed landed “like a bomb,” inside Goldman, said one executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The article reignited a debate on the Internet and on cable television over whether Wall Street was corrupted by greed and excess. Greg Smith, an executive at Goldman Sachs, resigned on March 14 and criticized the company’s culture. Goldman Executive's Letter Draws Backers, Detractors and Satirists. The Daily Mash carried a parody of the Goldman letter, supposedly written by Darth Vader.
If Greg Smith hoped to generate some buzz around his departure from Goldman Sachs, then he succeeded. In writing a New York Times Op-Ed article explaining why he was leaving the investment bank after more than a decade, Mr. Smith ignited a debate across Wall Street and around the Web about his now-former employer. As is the norm these days, Mr. Smith’s bridge-burning epistle tumbled through the cycle of support, backlash and backlash-to-the-backlash within a matter of hours. Mr. The Goldman resignation isn’t the first from the financial industry to gain notice.
Julia Werdigier/The New York TimesThe London Evening Standard made the contents of the letter front-page news. Mr. “He is completely toast in terms of Wall Street, no question about that,” the author William Cohan said on Bloomberg Television. Name It; Clients Are Called It. Associated PressFlight attendants are known to call some novice travelers “Clampetts,” after the fictional family in “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
Are you a Muppet or a Clancy? A Bobblehead or a Clampett? You may be, even if you do not know it. All of these are less-than-flattering code names that companies in a variety of industries have used to describe some of their customers or clients. The topic of name-calling on Wall Street landed on the front burner Wednesday after an executive director from Goldman Sachs, on his last day at the company, wrote an Op-Ed column in The New York Times in which he said that the investment bank often derided its customers as “Muppets.” Goldman’s top executives said in a message to the company’s employees that the firm had a “client-driven” culture. Advertising executives call people “Bobbleheads” if they approve of everything a boss says or does.
“You could interpret an ugly side to this,” Ms. But it is hard to top Wall Street for dark humor. Yes, Mr. Smith, Goldman Sachs Is All About Making Money: View. Apparently, when Greg Smith arrived at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
(GS) almost 12 years ago, the legendary investment firm was something like the Make-A-Wish Foundation -- existing only to bring light and peace and happiness to the world. Smith, who was executive director and head of the firm’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, does not go into details in his already notorious op-ed article in Wednesday’s New York Times, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.”
But one imagines Goldman bankers spending their days delivering fresh flowers to elderly shut-ins and providing shelters for abandoned cats. Serving clients was paramount. “It wasn’t just about making money,” Smith writes. Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs. Late-Night Comedians Riff on Goldman Op-Ed.