Word: blankfein
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...Cuomo, the New York State attorney general, we know that in 2008, while Goldman earned $2.3 billion for the year, it paid out $4.82 billion in bonuses, giving 953 employees at least $1 million each and 78 executives $5 million or more (although Goldman's top five officers, including Blankfein, declined a bonus...
Goldman's riches have deflected the spotlight from what should be great story fodder: Blankfein's personal journey from one of New York City's poorest neighborhoods to its most élite investment bank - and his astounding rise within Goldman. Instead, he has to explain Goldman's performance - and connections - in the face of the nation's epic financial calamity. (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers...
Friends in High Places Not least of those explanations has to do with Blankfein's appearance in the call logs of Henry Paulson, his predecessor as Goldman CEO, who was Treasury Secretary while the financial crisis started to unfold in early 2007 up until January 2009. For instance, in the week after Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse into bankruptcy last Sept. 15 - and while the Secretary was playing a major role in deciding whether to pump $85 billion into the rescue of insurance behemoth AIG - Paulson and Blankfein spoke 24 times. On one level it makes sense: a Treasury...
...confounding thing, of course, is that after the bailout of AIG, Goldman got $12.9 billion from AIG in the form of collateral that Goldman already had in its possession and a cash settlement of ongoing margin disputes. "The fact of the matter is, we already had the collateral," Blankfein says. "If AIG had defaulted, guess what - we would have kept the collateral from AIG and from the banks we'd bought protection from. The government's decision to bail out AIG was about the risks to the system. It wasn't about Goldman Sachs...
...Blankfein, the criticism seems distorted. "Something that was a virtue now looks like a vice," he says. "I don't think we're going to go far in this country if we make it a bad thing for people to migrate from business into other activities like writing or philanthropy or public service." Goldman, he notes, has already paid back the $10 billion - plus $318 million in dividends and an additional $1.1 billion to buy back warrants (at above-market value, he adds) - that Paulson forced it to take last October from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Taxpayers...