[GPSCC-chat] Inside look at Goldman Sachs

[Tian Harter]

In that article I found this paragraph:

 > At the heart of the rot were those derivatives, the collateralized
 > debt obligations (CDO) and credit default swaps (CDS) that were made
 > legal by the legislation Clinton signed and Siewert defended. In his
 > piece, Smith referred to the selling of those designed-to-be-toxic
 > products as the essential avenue of Goldman’s greed, saying you “find
 > yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid,
 > opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”

Ummm... Toxic levels of TLA stuff are also part of the Washington DC
thing. I think they can be traced back to IBM or maybe WW II. For sure
in the mid '80s I worked for an IBM alum that told me something like
"using TLAs well, we can make our private conversations sound like a
foreign language to the uninitiated."

My theory is that somewhere in the Pentagon there are people trying to
figure out how to pay for weapons programs, and at some point juggling
the TLAs turned into a game of hot potato, so to speak. Yeah the bond
traders are taking the fall, but they are only part of the problem.

Also there was this:

 > In addition to heading Goldman’s equity derivatives trading in Europe,
 > the Middle East and Africa, Smith was involved in recruiting new
 > talent for the company. It was his supervision over recruits being
 > exposed to the increasingly corrupt Goldman culture—amid routine
 > reference to clients as “muppets” and chortling about “ripping
 > eyeballs out”—that finally turned him off.

I'd disagree with Scheer's reading of that part of it to some extent,
because I found this paragraph in the source letter about quitting GS:

 > I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look
 > students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

There is a bit of difference in emphasis on the role of eyes in the
two quotes that matters to me. I say this because I was introduced
to the concept of customers as "eyeballs" at AOL, where the management
was all about "selling eyeballs" to advertisers. I'm not at all sure
what the phrase "ripping eyeballs out" meant at Goldman Sachs. Not sure
I want to know (shudder).

It was interesting to me that somewhere in all that it said South Africa
was where Smith was from.

Tian

Gerry Gras wrote:
> 
> FYI,
> 
> A response from Truthdig:
> 
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/at_last_some_decency_on_wall_street_20120314/ 
> 
> 
> Gerry
> 
> 
> Gerry Gras wrote:
>>
>> FYI,
>>
>> An inside critical look at Goldman Sachs:
>>
>> "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs"
>> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/14-5
>>
>> Gerry
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> sosfbay-discuss mailing list
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> 

-- 
Tian
http://tian.greens.org
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