Check price Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World

Check price Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World

Product Description

The bestselling author of the acclaimed House of Cards and The Last Tycoons turns his spotlight on to Goldman Sachs and the controversy behind its success.
 
From the outside, Goldman Sachs is a perfect company. The Goldman PR machine loudly declares it to be smarter, more ethical, and more profitable than all of its competitors. Behind closed doors, however, the firm constantly straddles the line between conflict of interest and legitimate deal making, wields significant influence over all levels of government, and upholds a culture of power struggles and toxic paranoia. And its clever bet against the mortgage market in 2007—unknown to its clients—may have made the financial ruin of the Great Recession worse. Money and Power reveals the internal schemes that have guided the bank from its founding through its remarkable windfall during the 2008 financial crisis. Through extensive research and interviews with the inside players, including current CEO Lloyd Blankfein, William Cohan constructs a nuanced, timely portrait of Goldman Sachs, the company that was too big—and too ruthless—to fail.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99691 in Books
• Published on: 2012-01-10
• Released on: 2012-01-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.18" h x 1.07" w x 6.07" l, 1.44 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Review

“[The] definitive account of the most profitable and influential investment bank of the modern era.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The best analysis yet of Goldman’s increasingly tangled web of conflicts. . . . The writing is crisp and the research meticulous.” —The Economist

“[A] revelatory account of the rise and rise of Goldman Sachs. . . . A vast trove of material.” —Financial Times
 
“Well done and absorbing. Cohan’s grasp of the . . . recent inside politics of the firm is sure and convincing.” —The Washington Post

“The frankest, most detailed, most human assessment of the bank to date. Cohan portrays a firm that has grown so large and hungry that it's no longer long-term greedy but short-term vicious. And that’s the wonder—and horror—of Goldman Sachs.” —BusinessWeek

“Brings the bank’s sometimes ‘schizophrenic’ behavior to vivid life. . . . Cohan evinces an eye for telling images and an ear for deadpan quotations. . . . [and] puts his skepticism to good use.” —Bloomberg News
 
“[Cohan is] one of our most able financial journalists.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“A former Wall Street man and a talented writer, [Cohan] has the rare gift not only of understanding the fiendishly complicated goings-on, but also of being able to explain them in terms the lay reader can grasp.” —The Observer (London)
 
“Cohan writes with an insider’s knowledge of the workings of Wall Street, a reporter’s investigative instincts and a natural storyteller’s narrative command.” —The New York Times

About the Author

William D. Cohan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers House of Cards and The Last Tycoons, which won the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has a weekly opinion column in Bloomberg View, and writes frequently for Fortune, The Atlantic, Art News, BloombergBusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Irish Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. He also is a contributing editor on Bloomberg Television and a frequent on-air contributor to MSNBC, CNN and CNBC. A former investment banker, Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Wall Street has always been a dangerous place. Firms have been going in and out of business ever since speculators first gathered under a button­wood tree near the southern tip of Manhattan in the late eighteenth century. Despite the ongoing risks, during great swaths of its mostly charmed 142 years, Goldman Sachs has been both envied and feared for having the best talent, the best clients, and the best political connections, and for its ability to alchemize them into extreme profitability and market prowess.

Indeed, of the many ongoing mysteries about Goldman Sachs, one of the most overarching is just how it makes so much money, year in and year out, in good times and in bad, all the while revealing as little as pos­sible to the outside world about how it does it. Another— equally confounding— mystery is the firm’s steadfast, zealous belief in its ability to manage its multitude of internal and external conflicts better than any other beings on the planet. The combination of these two genetic strains— the ability to make boatloads of money at will and to appear to manage conflicts that have humbled, then humiliated lesser firms— has made Goldman Sachs the envy of its financial- services brethren.
But it is also something else altogether: a symbol of immutable global power and unparalleled connections, which Goldman is shame­less in exploiting for its own benefit, with little concern for how its suc­cess affects the rest of us. The firm has been described as everything from “a cunning cat that always lands on its feet” to, now famously, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” by Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. The firm’s inexorable success leaves people wondering: Is Goldman Sachs better than everyone else, or have they found ways to win time and time again by cheating?

But in the early twenty- first century, thanks to the fallout from Goldman’s very success, the firm is looking increasingly vulnerable. To be sure, the firm has survived plenty of previous crises, starting with the Depression, when much of the firm’s capital was lost in a scam of its own creation, and again in the late 1940s, when Goldman was one of seven­teen Wall Street firms put on trial and accused of collusion by the federal government. In the past forty years, as a consequence of numerous scan­dals involving rogue traders, suicidal clients, and charges of insider trad­ing, the firm has come far closer— repeatedly— to financial collapse than its reputation would attest.

Each of these previous threats changed Goldman in some meaning­ful way and forced the firm to adapt to the new laws that either the mar­ket or regulators imposed. This time will be no different. What is different for Goldman now, though, is that for the first time since 1932— when Sidney Weinberg, then Goldman’s senior partner, knew that he could quickly reach his friend, President- elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt— the firm no longer appears to have sympathetic  high- level relationships in Washington. Goldman’s friends in high places, so crucial to the firm’s extraordinary success, are abandoning it. Indeed, in today’s charged political climate, which is polarized along socioeconomic lines, Goldman seems particularly isolated and demonized.

Certainly Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s fifty-six- year- old chairman and CEO, has no friend in President Barack Obama, despite being invited to a recent state dinner for the president of China. According to Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise, the “angriest” Obama got during his first year in office was when he heard Blankfein justify the firm’s $16.2 billion of bonuses in 2009 by claiming “Goldman was never in danger of collapse” during the financial crisis that began in 2007. According to Alter, President Obama told a friend that Blankfein’s statement was “flatly untrue” and added for good measure, “These guys want to be paid like rock stars when all they’re doing is lip- synching cap­italism.”

Complicating the firm’s efforts to be better understood by the American public— a group Goldman has never cared to  serve— is a  long-standing reticence among many of the firm’s current and former execu­tives, bankers, and traders to engage with the media in a constructive way. Even retired Goldman partners feel compelled to check with the firm’s disciplined administrative bureaucracy, run by John F. W. Rogers— a former chief of staff to James Baker, both at the White House and at the State Department— before agreeing to be interviewed. Most have likely signed confidentiality or nondisparagement agreements as a condition of their departures from the firm. Should they make them­selves available, unlike bankers and traders at other firms— where  self-aggrandizement in the press at the expense of colleagues is typical— Goldman types stay firmly on the message that what matters most is the Goldman team, not any one individual on it.

“They’re extremely disciplined,” explained one private- equity exec­utive who both competes and invests with Goldman. “They understand probably better than anybody how to never take the game face off. You’ll never get a Goldman banker after three beers saying, ‘You know, listen, my colleagues are a bunch of fucking dickheads.’ They just don’t do that the way other guys will, whether it’s because they tend to keep the uni­form on for a longer stretch of time so they’re not prepared to damage their squad, or whether or not it’s because they’re afraid of crossing the powers that be, once they’ve taken the blood oath... they maintain that discipline in a kind of eerily successful way.” 
 
 
Anyone who might have forgotten how dangerous Wall Street can be was reminded of it again, in spades, beginning in early 2007, as the market for home mortgages in the United States began to crack, and then implode, leading to the demise or near demise a year or so later of several large Wall Street firms that had been around for generations— including Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch— as well as other large financial institutions such as Citigroup, AIG, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia.

Although it underwrote billions of dollars of mortgage securities, Goldman Sachs avoided the worst of the crisis, thanks largely to a fully authorized, well- timed proprietary bet by a small group of Goldman traders— led by Dan Sparks, Josh Birnbaum, and Michael  Swenson— beginning in December 2006, that the housing bubble would collapse and that the securities tied to home mortgages would rapidly lose value. They were right.

In July 2007, David Viniar, Goldman’s longtime chief financial offi­cer, referred to this proprietary bet as “the big short” in an e-mail he wrote to Blankfein and others. During 2007, as other firms lost billions of dollars writing down the value of mortgage- related securities on their bal­ance sheets, Goldman was able to offset its own mortgage- related losses with huge gains— of some $4  billion— from its bet the housing market would fall.
Goldman earned a net profit in 2007 of $11.4 billion— then a record for the firm— and its top five executives split $322 million, another record on Wall Street. Blankfein, who took over the leadership of the firm in June 2006 when his predecessor, Henry Paulson Jr., became treasury secretary, received total compensation for the year of $70.3 mil­lion.

The following year, while many of Goldman’s competitors were fighting for their lives— a fight many of them would  lose— Goldman made a “substantial profit of $2.3 billion,” Blankfein wrote in an April 27, 2009, letter. Given the carnage on Wall Street in 2008, Goldman’s top five executives decided to eschew their bonuses. For his part, Blankfein made do with total compensation for the year of $1.1 million. (Not to worry, though; his 3.37 million Goldman shares are still worth around $570 million.)

Nothing in the financial world happens in a vacuum these days, given the exponential growth of trillions of dollars of securities tied to the value of other securities— known as “derivatives”—and the extraordinar­ily complex and internecine web of global trading relationships. Account­ing rules in the industry promote these interrelationships by requiring firms to check constantly with one another about the value of securities on their balance sheets to make sure that value is reflected as accurately as possible. Naturally, since judgment is involved, especially with ever more complex securities, disagreements among traders about values are common.

Goldman Sachs prides itself on being a “mark- to- market” firm, Wall Street argot for being ruthlessly precise about the value of the securities— known as “marks”—on its balance sheet. Goldman believes its precision promotes transparency, allowing the firm and its investors to make better decisions, including the decision to bet the mortgage market would collapse in 2007. “Because we are a mark- to- market firm,” Blank­fein once wrote, “we believe the assets on our balance sheet are a true and realistic reflection of book value.” If, fo...