Word: goldman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Read "Too Much Profit at Goldman and Morgan...
...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...
Still, an AIG default could have been catastrophic for Goldman, although Goldman claims to have been perfectly hedged against an AIG bankruptcy. "If AIG would have gone bankrupt, it would have affected every institution in the world, because it would have had a big effect on the entire financial system," explains David Viniar, Goldman's CFO. He countered, though, that Goldman would have most likely figured out how to make money trading in such a volatile environment. (See TIME's AIG cover...