From the bestselling, prize-winning author of THE LAST
TYCOONS and HOUSE OF CARDS, a revelatory history of Goldman
Sachs, the most dominant, feared, and controversial
investment bank in the world
For much of its storied 142-year history, Goldman Sachs has
projected an image of being better than its
competitors--smarter, more collegial, more ethical, and far
more profitable. The firm--buttressed by the most aggressive
and sophisticated p.r. machine in the financial
industry--often boasts of "The Goldman Way," a business
model predicated on hiring the most talented people,
indoctrinating them in a corporate culture where partners
stifle their egos for the greater good, and honoring the "14
Principles," the first of which is "Our clients' interests
always come first."
But there is another way of viewing Goldman--a secretive
money-making machine that has straddled the line between
conflict-of-interest and legitimate deal-making for decades;
a firm that has exerted undue influence over government
since the early part of the 20th century; a company composed
of "cyborgs" who are kept in line by an internal
"reputational risk department" staffed by former CIA
operatives and private investigators; a workplace rife with
brutal power struggles; a Wall Street titan whose clever bet
against the mortgage market in 2007--a bet not revealed to
its clients--may have made the financial ruin of the Great
Recession worse.
As William D. Cohan shows in his riveting chronicle of
Goldman's rise to the summit of world capitalism, the firm
has shown a remarkable ability to weather financial crises,
congressional, federal and SEC investigations, and numerous
lawsuits, all with its reputation and its enormous profits
intact. By reading thousands of pages of government
documents, court cases, SEC filings, Freedom of Information
Act papers and other sources, and conducting over 100
interviews, including interviews with clients, competitors,
regulators, current and former Goldman employees (including
the six living men who have run Goldman), Cohan has
constructed a vivid narrative that looks behind the veil of
secrecy to reveal how Goldman has become so profitable, and
so powerful.
Part of the answer is the firm's assiduous cultivation of
people in power--dating back to 1913, when Henry Goldman
advised the government on how the new Federal Reserve,
designed to oversee Wall Street, should be constituted.
Sidney Weinberg, who ran the firm for four decades, advised
presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy and was nicknamed "The
Politician" for his behind-the-scenes friendships with
government officials. Goldman executives ran fundraising
efforts for Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush. The
firm showered lucrative consulting or speaking fees on
figures like Henry Kissinger and Lawrence Summers. Famously,
and fatefully, two Goldman leaders-- Robert Rubin and Henry
Paulson--became Secretaries of the Treasury, where their
actions both before and during the financial crisis of 2008
became the stuff of controversy and conspiracy theories.
Another major strand in the firm's DNA is its eagerness to
deal on both sides of a transaction, eliding questions of
conflict of interest by the mere assertion of their innate
honesty and nobility, a refrain repeated many times in its
history, most notoriously by current Goldman CEO Lloyd
Blankfein's jesting assertion that he was doing "God's work."
As Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of HOUSE OF
CARDS said, "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." In
MONEY & POWER, Cohan has marshaled all these gifts in a
powerful and definitive account of an institution whose
public claims of virtue look very much like ruthlessness
when exposed to the light of day.
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