Not Quite a Confession, But a Good Start

By Steven Pearlstein
WashPost
Wednesday, April 8, 2009

For the past year, as the nation has engaged in a heated debate about how we got into the current financial mess and how we're going to get out of it, there's been one group noticeably missing from the conversation: leaders of the big Wall Street firms.

With the exception of the occasional public floggings organized by congressional committees and the quiet off-the-record lunches with newspaper editorial boards, the titans of finance have remained hunkered down in their bunkers. In public, at least, they have declined to accept personal and institutional responsibility for what went wrong, to explain more fully how and why it happened or even to express a simple thank you for the government's extraordinary rescue efforts. At a time when it was most needed, industry leadership has been nonexistent.

Until now. In a speech yesterday in Washington to the Council of Institutional Investors, Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, took the first trip through the public confessional, acknowledging that "the past year has been deeply humbling" for an industry that held itself out as expert but disappointed customers and shareholders by taking actions that "look self-serving and greedy in hindsight."

"We collectively neglected to raise enough questions about whether some of the trends and practices that became commonplace really served the public's long-term interests," said Blankfein, whose unflashy, straightforward style is more Mr. Whipple than Gordon Gekko.

(More here.)