After 12 years working at Goldman Sachs, exec Greg Smith decided to quit.
But first, he penned this scathing op-ed in The New York Times, accusing the 143-year-old investment bank of losing its moral fiber and calling its clients "muppets."
Greg wrote:
I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.
It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.
Goldman Sachs, unsurprisingly, disagreed:
A Goldman Sachs spokesman responded to the piece early Wednesday: “We disagree with the views expressed, which we don’t think reflect the way we run our business. In our view, we will only be successful if our clients are successful. This fundamental truth lies at the heart of how we conduct ourselves.”
Link | Greg's Op-Ed in The NY Times
Either way, Goldman has been ripping off clients for years. Zerohedge.com has been calling them on this forever...essentially saying that if you want to make money, do the opposite of what Goldman tells its clients to do.
@Bearfoot - let's take the opposite of what I say, then: are you saying that's impossible for corporate culture to change?
Probability is different than possibility