RIP Goldman Sachs
When I started out at Goldman, it was the most feared firm on Wall Street. Those days are gone for good.
My first job after college was as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. The three years I spent there were very long — time plays tricks on you when you're working 100 hours a week — and very unhappy. But they were also very formative. I learned how to think about how a business makes money. I learned how to work really hard. I learned how not to be intimidated. And I acquired a deep and lasting paranoia of being even a minute late, a mindset that is familiar to anyone who has been a junior analyst at Goldman, and one that my friends today find equal parts baffling and amusing.
As the years passed, my short stint at Goldman continued to give me a sneaky sense of pride. I say "sneaky" because after the global financial crisis of 2008, criticism of the bank — some of it even written by me — mounted dramatically, culminating in Matt Taibbi's famous piece likening the firm to a "vampire squid." But here's the thing: The criticism always contained a trace of awe. There was a mystique to Goldman. It was cool and competent. Even when it lost hundreds of millions on a trading bet gone awry, or intentionally screwed its own clients, well, that had a certain swagger to it. Being a partner at Goldman meant you were part of the greatest wealth-creation machine the world had ever known. You were one of Wall Street's kings. "Thank God I didn't go to Morgan Stanley," I'd think to myself as I watched Morgan transform itself from a firm that was once very much like Goldman — prestigious, brilliant, a bit mysterious — into yet another run-of-the-mill firm that catered mostly to retail investors.
Which is why the past few years of bad press about Goldman, mainly focused on CEO David Solomon, have been shocking, and oddly painful — the way you feel when something you didn't realize mattered to you is being broken. It isn't just that the bitterness about Solomon's leadership has spilled outside the firm, prompting The Wall Street Journal to describe Goldman, in a headline, as "at war with itself." It's that the leaks are coming from very senior levels inside the firm — a development one longtime Goldman observer I spoke with called "unprecedented." While there was always plenty of internecine warfare at the firm — think CEO Jon Corzine being knifed by his partners — what happened at Goldman stayed at Goldman. As Solomon recently confessed to a former partner, "It's a very, very hard war, and I'm being fracked by my own troops."
Business Analytics Manager at WHOOP
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