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...anyone shoulders the "blame" for Goldman's golden performance, it is Blankfein. Self-deprecating and seemingly unassuming, the former gold salesman has been ruthlessly ambitious for his firm and its continued success. "He takes it very personally when people act against the firm or show disloyalty," says a former Goldman executive. (See the worst business deals...
After taking the reins of the company when Paulson went to Treasury in July 2006, he accelerated Goldman's transformation from a firm that depended on its clients for investment-banking revenue - fees generated from advising on deals to underwriting debt and equity securities - to one whose clients are driving a resurgent trading and risk-taking business. Goldman has a tradition of taking trading risks. In the postwar era, the firm's DNA has always combined the interlocking strands represented by two of the world's foremost risk arbitrageurs - first Gus Levy and later Robert Rubin - with the investment-banker...
...derivative-driven innovations and massive leverage, Blankfein is the firm's chief advocate for taking risks but also its chief risk watchdog. He has a far different perspective from that of most of the previous Goldman bosses. In December 2006, Viniar led a meeting of senior Goldman executives to examine ongoing daily losses in the firm's mortgage portfolio. Goldman had already underwritten and sold billions of dollars' worth of mortgage-backed securities, much of it labeled investment grade by ratings agencies. It was, in fact, junk. But Goldman realized earlier than most that rot was setting in and famously...
...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 that Goldman had purchased in November 1981 for about $100 million...
...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-exchange business. Rubin, then on the firm's management committee and responsible for both risk arbitrage and J. Aron, had advised Winkelman against it. According to Charles Ellis' 2008 book about Goldman, The Partnership, Rubin told him, "We've never seen it work to put salespeople in charge of trading in other areas of the firm. Are you pretty...