Blankfein ends sandbag saga
GOLDMAN Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein may be no stranger to popular criticism, but decided enough was enough after his firm’s robust rebuffing of hurricane Sandy attracted scorn.
With the bank’s New York building sandbagged to high heavens and basking in the glow of its generator-fuelled lights last week, Blankfein took some stick on Twitter. “The fact that the NYU hospital is dark but Goldman Sachs is well-lit is everything that’s wrong with this country,” wrote one.
But speaking at the Business Book of the Year awards, Blankfein refused to apologise for being well prepared: “When we built our building, we built it with a lot of redundancy and backup power. The day before the hurricane, we put 25,000 sandbags around our building, and the front of our building looked ridiculous, but it worked.”
He continued: “I’m not going to take it that someone is going to scorn us for doing what we did. We worked hard and did sensible things. And by the way, having done that, it put us in a position to help other people in the neighbourhood.”
And with that it was back to the ceremony where, unsurprisingly, Greg Smith’s scathing tome Why I Left Goldman Sachs was not shortlisted.