Goldman Sachs Is Packin

[thej27]

Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public: Alice Schroeder - Bloomberg.com

Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public: Alice Schroeder Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A


Commentary by Alice Schroeder


Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.
While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image -- and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.”
Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.
Pistol Ready
Common sense tells you a handgun is probably not even all that useful. Suppose an intruder sneaks past the doorman or jumps the security fence at night. By the time you pull the pistol out of your wife’s jewelry safe, find the ammunition, and load your weapon, Fifi the Pomeranian has already been taken hostage and the gun won’t do you any good. As for carrying a loaded pistol when you venture outside, dream on. Concealed gun permits are almost impossible for ordinary citizens to obtain in New York or nearby states.
In other words, a little humility and contrition are probably the better route.
Until a couple of weeks ago, that was obvious to everyone but Goldman, a firm famous for both prescience and arrogance. In a display of both, Blankfein began to raise his personal- security threat level early in the financial crisis. He keeps a summer home near the Hamptons, where unrestricted public access would put him at risk if the angry mobs rose up and marched to the East End of Long Island.
To the Barricades
He tried to buy a house elsewhere without attracting attention as the financial crisis unfolded in 2007, a move that was foiled by the New York Post. Then, Blankfein got permission from the local authorities to install a security gate at his house two months before Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.
This is the kind of foresight that Goldman Sachs is justly famous for. Blankfein somehow anticipated the persecution complex his fellow bankers would soon suffer. Surely, though, this man who can afford to surround himself with a private army of security guards isn’t sleeping with the key to a gun safe under his pillow. The thought is just too bizarre to be true.
So maybe other senior people at Goldman Sachs have gone out and bought guns, and they know something. But what?
Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and -- oh yes -- the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”
Torn Curtain
There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.
This slip-up let the other bailed-out banks happily hand off public blame to Goldman, which is unpopular among its peers because it always seems to win at everyone’s expense.
Plenty of Wall Streeters worry about the big discrepancies in wealth, and think the rise of a financial industry-led plutocracy is unjust. That doesn’t mean any of them plan to move into a double-wide mobile home as a show of solidarity with the little people, though.
Cool Hand Lloyd
No, talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.
And if the proles really do appear brandishing pitchforks at the doors of Park Avenue and the gates of Round Hill Road, you can be sure that the Goldman guys and their families will be holed up in their safe rooms with their firearms. If nothing else, that pistol permit might go part way toward explaining why they won’t be standing outside with the rest of the crowd, broke and humiliated, saying, “Damn, I was on the wrong side of a trade with Goldman again.”
(Alice Schroeder, author of “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this column: Alice Schroeder at aliceschroeder@ymail.com.
Last Updated: November 30, 2009 21:00 EST

 

[TopDog]

Call me shallow

Common sense tells you a handgun is probably not even all that useful. Suppose an intruder sneaks past the doorman or jumps the security fence at night. By the time you pull the pistol out of your wife’s jewelry safe, find the ammunition, and load your weapon, Fifi the Pomeranian has already been taken hostage and the gun won’t do you any good.

Hey maybe I am shallow. I read the article and all I got out of it was a laugh. I got how unless an untrained fool is with a gun. This is the exact image that formed in my mind of a liberal that has probably opposed the 2A all his life and now fears for his life and wants a gun but has no idea what to do with it. I just feel sorry for Fifi.

 

[JetGirl]

So the people at Goldman Sachs are lookin' over their shoulders and feeling a tad uneasy, huh?
Good.

 

[SavageEagle]

The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

Does this bother anyone else?

 

[Mike_M]

Just curious..... does anyone know what French Aristocracy was doing to protect themselves just before the peasants began building guillotines in the town square????

Might be a valid historical comparison.

 

[Cat-Herder]

I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit

I wonder how long it takes to write a character reference for a vampire? "well, he's going to need something to protect himself from the horde of people whose lives he's destroyed"

JUMP ALREADY!

my .02

 

[Cat-Herder]

oops, double tap.

 

[evansvillethompsongunner]

Well, if millions of people wanted to lynch me and hang me outside the second-story window-front of my shiny multi-billion dollar building which housed transactions worth trillions whilst shafting people out of their hard-earned money all the while - well, I'd want some protection, too.

But, unlike these bankers, I would understand the futility of doing so.

 

[hornadylnl]

Class warfare is alive and well on INGO.

 

[SavageEagle]

Class warfare is alive and well on INGO.

I wouldn't call it class warfare. I'd call it criminal warfare.

 

[hornadylnl]

I wouldn't call it class warfare. I'd call it criminal warfare.

So every employee of Goldman Sachs is a verified criminal? If someone committed a crime, then they should be tried for it. Wishing death on them is altogether different. Simply working as a banker or investor does not make one a criminal. Please point out what crimes these guys committed.

 

[rambone]

There is nothing remarkable about a banker buying a pistol. Sales of guns have been at record highs since November 2008 and are not showing signs of dropping. Everybody is buying guns. It is the one industry that is booming in America.

People are generally scared about the future. They are worried about upcoming laws that could limit their ability to buy guns in the future. They are worried about rising unemployment - and rising crime rates that are sure to follow - and their ability to defend themselves. Maybe a few are actually worried about lynch mobs, but I think that is media sensationalism.

 

[rambone]

Common sense tells you a handgun is probably not even all that useful. Suppose an intruder sneaks past the doorman or jumps the security fence at night. By the time you pull the pistol out of your wife’s jewelry safe, find the ammunition, and load your weapon, Fifi the Pomeranian has already been taken hostage and the gun won’t do you any good.

This sentence is just this liberal newpaper's way of throwing some anti-gun logic into the article.



Using the author's "common sense" will leave you dead. Why not arm the doorman? Why not keep the pistol loaded and more accessible to you? Storing it their way is about as accessible as leaving it in your safe deposit box at the bank.

As Hornadylnl said, the act of simply accepting "bailout money" does not make the employees of Goldman Sachs criminals. The outrage should be directed at the Congress who voted to give out tax-dollars for unconstitutional purposes. If members of Congress were arming themselves, that would be very interesting indeed.

 

[hornadylnl]

As Hornadylnl said, the act of simply accepting "bailout money" does not make the employees of Goldman Sachs criminals. The outrage should be directed at the Congress who voted to give out tax-dollars for unconstitutional purposes. If members of Congress were arming themselves, that would be very interesting indeed.

But it's more fun to blame the market when the market is the only solution. The bailouts are government and government alones fault. If we let the market work, inept and corrupt businesses would fail and be weeded out. Instead, our bailouts subsidize and reward failure.

 

[jedi]

Using the author's "common sense" will leave you dead. Why not arm the doorman? Why not keep the pistol loaded and more accessible to you? Storing it their way is about as accessible as leaving it in your safe deposit box at the bank.

I'm not sure about NY laws but in DC it was NOT possible to keep a loaded firearm inside the house. The gun has to be locked and the ammo had to be locked in a seperate container. This might be the case for NY as well not sure. Thus why the comment from the article.

 

[evansvillethompsongunner]

This sentence is just this liberal newpaper's way of throwing some anti-gun logic into the article.



Using the author's "common sense" will leave you dead. Why not arm the doorman? Why not keep the pistol loaded and more accessible to you? Storing it their way is about as accessible as leaving it in your safe deposit box at the bank.

As Hornadylnl said, the act of simply accepting "bailout money" does not make the employees of Goldman Sachs criminals. The outrage should be directed at the Congress who voted to give out tax-dollars for unconstitutional purposes. If members of Congress were arming themselves, that would be very interesting indeed.

It is just as much a crime to accept stolen money as to give it away - especially when you know that it's been stolen.

Lynch them all and sort out the mess into human-jerky and human sausage later, what say.

I don't direct my veritable rage towards the man who's earned his wealth - far from it, he deserves praise for doing well. But to take billions of taxpayer dollars simply because poor management and unethical choices have lead that business into the poorhouse doesn't mean it then deserves to bankrupt We, the People - no sir, I hope we never learn to stand for this kind of .

Also, yeah, that article is bunk.
A doorman? I don't know a single person here in Indiana who has a doorman, much less a Pomerianian... or who doesn't have the common sense to load their pistols.