We understand you quite well, thank you very much. And we're not just mad at you, we're mad about a lot of things. We're mad about a government that has been corrupted to the core by the Wall Street lobbyists and other bottom feeders. We're mad at people that promise us change and then continue to kowtow to corporations. We're mad about companies like Goldman that continue to screw the public. We're mad about companies like BP, that through their greed and negligence kill people, defenseless animals and the American way of life.
Personally, I'm irate at the Ponzi scheme called fractional reserve lending that has given banks the license to leach off the backs of hard working Americans for almost 100 years. If you don't understand why people are mad at Goldman, then you need to get out of your cushy offices and take a better look at what you think 'investing' is all about. People used to invest in a company because they believed in that company and wanted to support that company. Wall Street today has become a playground for spoiled psychopaths to extract unearned income from the average American.
FORTUNE -- With all the public fury aimed at Goldman Sachs these days, it should come as no surprise that an employee or two of the storied investment bank wishes that things were somehow ... different.Read the rest here
But how much different? If you believe backyard barbecue conversations, at least some of them wish they were -- and this is no joke -- a retail bank.
You heard that right. The uber-wealthy swashbucklers of finance wish that they had themselves a pair of modest green eyeshades. This is clearly schizophrenia of the highest order.
Let us back up a moment and explain. Last weekend, my editor was told by a couple of Goldman employees that the reason the public ire toward Goldman was so intense was that to most people, Goldman's business (proprietary trading, investment banking, etc.) was an abstract concept that they didn't really understand.
As a result, it was easily reduced to caricature -- a soulless money-making machine, a bloodsucking squid on the economy -- and it was equally easy for the mind of the man on the street to convert that abstraction into another, even simpler one called "evil."
Things would be different, the Goldman folks said, if the company happened to own a good old American bank. You know, the kind that Goldman's rivals J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) own. The kind with an ATM on the street corner.
People are mad at their banks, sure, but they also know that a bank is just a bank, and not the evil dark force of international finance that is Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500). Or so the thinking of the Goldman people goes. Their problem, in other words, isn't what they do, it's what they don't do.
We're not so sure about that.
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2 COMMENTS:
Maybe this will help Goldman employees..
That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Lie
Having spent a goodly amount of time at the now-defunct First Boston Corporation, I understand investment banking and prop trading just fine, thank you, Goldman Sachs. These things, like all tools, are neither good nor bad.
Flash orders, HFT, exchange colocation, are all concepts that boil down to a single word that every grade school child knows: cheating.
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