The Great Goldman Sachs Fire Sale of 2008
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
NYT
In an interview last week, President Obama said he didn’t begrudge Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorganChase, and Lloyd Blankfein, the head man at Goldman Sachs, their 2009 bonuses of $17 million and $9 million, respectively. He said that while $17 million was “an extraordinary amount of money,” there are “some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
While one could argue that, metaphorically anyway, both Dimon and Blankfein made it to the World Series in 2009 — with Blankfein, whose firm earned $13.4 billion last year, being the M.V.P. — President Obama went one step further in trying to publicly support Wall Street by saying he knew both men to be “savvy businessmen,” and that “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.”
Obama was of course simply repeating a bedrock principle of American capitalism that even the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression cannot dislodge. But one wonders if the president would be a bit more begrudging if he knew that at the height of the financial crisis, many of Goldman Sachs’s top deal-makers — although not Blankfein himself — moved quickly to unload their own stock in their firm. This happened both in March 2008, after Bear Stearns collapsed, and again that September, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near-unwinding of the rest of Wall Street.
(More here.)
NYT
In an interview last week, President Obama said he didn’t begrudge Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorganChase, and Lloyd Blankfein, the head man at Goldman Sachs, their 2009 bonuses of $17 million and $9 million, respectively. He said that while $17 million was “an extraordinary amount of money,” there are “some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
While one could argue that, metaphorically anyway, both Dimon and Blankfein made it to the World Series in 2009 — with Blankfein, whose firm earned $13.4 billion last year, being the M.V.P. — President Obama went one step further in trying to publicly support Wall Street by saying he knew both men to be “savvy businessmen,” and that “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.”
Obama was of course simply repeating a bedrock principle of American capitalism that even the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression cannot dislodge. But one wonders if the president would be a bit more begrudging if he knew that at the height of the financial crisis, many of Goldman Sachs’s top deal-makers — although not Blankfein himself — moved quickly to unload their own stock in their firm. This happened both in March 2008, after Bear Stearns collapsed, and again that September, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near-unwinding of the rest of Wall Street.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home