Word: goldmans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...wake of Winkelman's departure from the firm after he'd been passed over for the top job at Goldman in favor of Jon Corzine (now governor of New Jersey), Blankfein was selected to run J. Aron. His appetite for risk quickly surfaced. In 1995 he chided his fellow partners for being too risk-averse and promptly left a conference room where they were meeting to place a multimillion-dollar bet with the firm's money that the dollar would rise against the yen. Blankfein's bet - one of his favorites - paid off, and he impressed his partners...
...December 2003 he was named Goldman's chief operating officer and co-president after the departure of John Thain - Blankfein's rival to lead the firm - who left to become CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. By then, Blankfein had impressed Goldman's board of directors and especially Paulson, then the CEO, with his tenacity, ambition and hands-on management style. "Hank became increasingly concerned about whether [John] Thornton or Thain" - the co-presidents of Goldman before Blankfein - "would assume responsibility for the business units and show they could run things," says a former Goldman partner. "Lloyd showed...
Defending Goldman's Crown When, in July 2006, president Bush tapped Paulson to be Secretary of the Treasury - in the great Goldman tradition - Blankfein's journey from a Brooklyn housing complex to the pinnacle of American capitalism was complete. By then, all of Blankfein's quirky bad habits had been eliminated too. Blankfein has since become a snappier dresser, has lost weight and has given up smoking and gambling. He shaved his once unsightly beard. "I wasn't going to make myself taller," he once quipped when asked about his transformation. He in effect reduced the risks in his personal...