Word: thingness
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...first thing I learned from talking to Nasuk is that calling someone an Eskimo isn't cool, since some believe it's a term for raw-meat eater. That sounded pretty bad until I realized it's exactly what yuppie meant in the 1980s. A proud Inupiat, Nasuk said that when her people were hunter-gatherers in the freezing North Slope, they sometimes had to leave behind the weak and elderly. "My understanding is that elders would voluntarily stay behind. It wouldn't have been a cruel practice. It would have been an acceptance of 'I'm dying...
...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...
...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 as a prudent risk taker. He would do the same thing - exhort them to take greater risks - 10 years later and then persuade them to reverse course after December...
Blankfein is convinced that Goldman Sachs is good for its clients, for the world's capital markets - and yes, for America as well. "I would like for us to be thought of as always doing the right thing and for people at the firm to be confident that they are doing the right thing," he says. Now if only he could get the public to see things this...