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Blankfein's deftness under pressure impressed his partners. "He is a totally independent-minded guy," says another senior Goldman official. "Ten years ago, I think most people would have said that it is highly unlikely that Lloyd would be CEO and highly unlikely that he would succeed. But he has done both, and it seems like a dream in this environment ... It's a bit of a miracle. It was unpredicted...
...Read "Goldman's Profits: Gambling with Taxpayer Money...
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 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...
...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-exchange business. Rubin, then...