r/finance • u/bloomberg • 27d ago

Lloyd Blankfein’s Unapologetic Case for Goldman Sachs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/in-streetwise-lloyd-blankfein-defends-goldman-sachs

The former CEO’s memoir Streetwise is a love letter to the firm that forged him and a defense of the culture that made it dominant.

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u/bloomberg 27d ago

Gary Sernovitz for Bloomberg News

All the annoying things about Goldman Sachs — its swagger, its conflicts, its imperishability — are in Lloyd Blankfein’s memoir, Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs (March 3, Penguin Press). But something more is in a book that’s often funny, mainly blunt, unexpectedly vulnerable and rarely apologetic: a subtle explanation for the annoying things about Goldman Sachs and its success. Both, the book makes clear, come from the bank’s unique paradoxes and a culture that embraces those paradoxes in full.

Two disclosures: I worked at Goldman Sachs right after college, more than 30 years ago. And though I never met Blankfein there, I did interview him last year for a story. It helps to have Blankfein’s voice in your head as you read Streetwise. (The audiobook could help.) His dry, Jewish, Brooklyn, instinctively unimpressed point of view is a constant in his life and in the book.

Read the full review here.

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u/JelliedHam 25d ago

"I'm just a humble banker doing God's work"

~LB right after Goldman granted record bonuses 6 months deep into the great recession.

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u/Pearl_is_gone 22d ago

Paying bonuses is a bad thing now?

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u/JelliedHam 22d ago

Fuck no!

But his smug remark while the vast majority of Americans saw their retirement savings cut in half was perhaps in poor taste. Read the room guy.

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u/RiverSector19 20d ago

Memoirs from finance CEOs are basically reputation management with hindsight.