Jenny Anderson has a very entertaining piece in today’s New York Times (that I’m kind of amazed didn’t make page 1) about business-as-usual returning at Goldman Sachs:
“We did not have a near-death experience,” said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save Goldman Sachs, he said. …
Is Goldman gambling at America’s expense? Of course not, Mr. Cohn said. Should it change its business strategy in the wake of the gravest financial crisis since the Depression? No. Is Goldman taking big risks to make big profits? Courting more outrage over Wall Street pay with its plans to pay lavish bonuses? Throwing its weight around in Washington?
No, no, no.
It sounds like the gang at Goldman may be getting a teeny weeny bit delusional. This could be a case where that famously tight-knit Goldman culture (probably born, The Epicurean Dealmaker nicely explained last week, of the fact that Goldman—unlike all its big Wall Street competitors—hasn’t diluted that culture with “ill-advised mergers of acquisitions”) could be working to its detriment. Does Cohn not get how much the world outside of Goldman has changed?
Then again, the of-course-we’re-going-back-to-doing-what-we-were-doing attitude is shared by a lot of people at other Wall Street firms. What they were doing was insanely lucrative, so of course they want to go back to doing it. Unless Washington stops them, or at least reins them in somewhat.