Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Yesterday, a reporter at a mainstream media outlet ran the following sentence in her coverage of Greg Smith, the Goldman Sachs Vice President who resigned in March via an oped in the New York Times charging the firm with a corrupt environment: “Smith is the first former employee to write a critical account of his career at New York-
I wrote to the reporter and the editor of the piece requesting a correction, alerting them that a highly respected former managing director of Goldman Sachs, Nomi Prins, had specifically attributed leaving a 15-year career on Wall Street to one firm’s hubris — Goldman Sachs. I included this passage from Prins’ 2004 book, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America:
“When I left Wall Street, at the height of a wave of scandals uncovering scores of massively destructive deceptions, my choice was based on a very personal sense of right and wrong…So, when people who didn’t know me very well asked me why I left the banking industry after a fifteen-year climb up the corporate ladder, I answered, ‘Goldman Sachs.’
“For it was not until I reached the inner sanctum of this autocratic and hypocritical organization – one too conceited to have its name or logo visible from the sidewalk of its 85 Broad Street headquarters [now relocated to 200 West Street] that I realized I had to get out…The fact that my decision coincided with corporate malfeasance of epic proportions made me realize that it was far more important to use my knowledge to be part of the solution than to continue being part of the problem.”
The media outlet ran a correction of sorts but it failed dramatically in capturing the essence of the relevancy of this information to the Greg Smith story. That is, within a span of eight years, two highly paid executives of Goldman Sachs gave up their Wall Street careers because of Goldman Sachs’ culture and a genuine desire to change that culture for the good of both Wall Street and the country.
Since at least 1989, well written narratives from executives emerging from Wall Street have depicted a thoroughly corrupt model in critical need of reform. What Congress delivered to America was the exact opposite – looser regulation with a corresponding rise in corruption.
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