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A SENIOR EXECUTIVE at the investment bank, Goldman Sachs, has published his resignation letter in today’s New York Times criticising what he says is the company’s “toxic and destructive” environment.
Greg Smith is today resigning as the company’s executive director and head of the firm’s US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
He takes issue primarily with the way the firm treats its clients now in comparison to their treatment when he first began working with Goldman.
“To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,” he writes, adding:
Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.
He criticises the firm’s current chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, and president, Gary Cohn, saying that the pair “lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch”.
I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fibre represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.
Smith writes that he knew it was time to leave after 12 years “when I realised I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”
Writing on the Telegraph website, political commentator Iain Martin describes Smith’s letter as “a devastating knee in the nuts” for Goldman Sachs.
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Horrendous act of pure evil. With guns available so readily any person with a grievance or psychotic motive can commit a mass murder at any time, anywhere.
5th a mass KILLING this year alone, it’s 23 January. That’s a mass shooting every 4 days or so.
There’s actually been 33 Mass Shootings in January – That’s almost 1.5 mass shootings per day!
Any other country experiences a mass shooting and the next day they are putting into place stricter gun controls. Not America, they want to put guns in everyones hands to protect others against a mass shooter… what a weird way of thinking…
So sad to think of all the needless deaths and suffering. I am not sure that gun control would even be enough – but it might be a start. However, something in the US physic seems to create an element of self entitlement which manifests in many ways and not just in mass shootings. Still we hope and pray.
@Bert Carolan: I can’t remember the exact statistic, but it would take an incredible amount of time to decommission all the guns owned in America. I think it was beyond decades and into hundreds of years. The logistics that would be involved are staggering.
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