Word: blankfein
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...Young Blankfein thrived. He stayed out of trouble by not getting off the school bus when he saw things happening that made him uncomfortable. He studied hard. He was the valedictorian of his 1971 graduating class at the predominantly black Thomas Jefferson High School. At 16, he applied to Harvard, solely because Harvard had gone to the school to recruit. Using a combination of financial aid and scholarships, he graduated in 1975. Ben Bernanke was in his class. In the class-of-'75 yearbook, Bernanke was pictured near Blankfein, who was wearing a fashionable houndstooth blazer with groovy wide lapels...
These early triumphs in the face of adversity understandably shaped his ambition and his worldview. "You can never forget that Lloyd came from a pretty significantly challenging environment," explains Robert Steel, Blankfein's former partner at Goldman and an Under Secretary for Paulson at Treasury. "That's at the root of Lloyd." Steel recalls that Blankfein shared stories about life at Thomas Jefferson High School. "You survive by either one of two things," Steel says Blankfein told him. "You were either a great athlete or funny and entertaining, and I decided to go with funny and entertaining...
...Blankfein also developed some pretty bad habits. Once upon a time, he smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a day. He was overweight. He often dressed inappropriately or ostentatiously. And he had a love of gambling in Las Vegas. (See hard times hitting Las Vegas...
...Blankfein was on partner track at Donovan, but then he had what he calls a pre-midlife crisis and decided to make the switch, if he could, to investment banking. He applied for banking jobs at Dean Witter, Morgan Stanley and Goldman. He did not make the cut in Goldman's famously exhaustive recruitment process (or at the other two firms either). "It wasn't a nutty decision. I was a lawyer," he says. "I didn't have a finance background." Instead, in 1982 he landed a job as a gold salesman for J. Aron & Co., an obscure commodities firm...
Over time, Blankfein became a major part of J. Aron's success. But at first, he says, he was not very good at the job. "I had trouble with the language, with the speed and the pacing." Soon enough, though, he designed a lucrative $100 million trade - then the largest of its kind Goldman had ever handled - for a Muslim client to comply with the religion's rules against receiving interest payments. In 1984, Goldman partner and J. Aron chief Mark Winkelman put Blankfein in charge of a group of foreign-exchange salesmen and later in charge of all foreign...