HuffPo: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claims he is "doing God's work"

Charles Gasparino
Author, Selling Out
Posted: November 9, 2009 02:32 PM

Goldman Sachs Doing "God's Work"?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-gasparino/post_439_b_351116.html

The only thing worse than Goldman Sachs amassing close to $20 billion in bonus money for its executives based on various government subsidies and bailout measures is listening to senior executives there trying to explain it all away. The spin job has been coming from an unlikely source: The normally media shy Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has been making the rounds lately, talking to selective reporters, including William Cohan, who recently wrote a book about the fall of Bear Stearns and now has the firm's complete cooperation as to write something on Goldman Sachs, the most prestigious of the Wall Street firms, even if it needed a bailout to survive last year's financial crisis..

Cohan's Bear book, the first of many financial crisis tomes (including my own) wasn't exactly a puff piece, but trading access for information is a time honored journalistic practice, and it's human nature to be nicer to someone who gives you information. So presumably we'll all find out from Cohan how, in the throes of the financial crisis, Goldman really didn't need the $10 billion in bailout money it received from the federal government as its stock cratered; that it was forced to take the cash from then-Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman CEO) Hank Paulson, or how despite its exposure to troubled insurance giant AIG, Goldman was miraculously "hedged," against losses, meaning that the fed's AIG's bailout last year didn't really help Goldman survive last year's panic. No, Goldman survived because it was built for survival.

Forget the absurdity of such claims, Blankfein has been on a roll of late, repeating them time and again, not just presumably to Cohan, but to a growing number of credulous journalists who will stomach just about anything to get a few minutes with the CEO of the Great Goldman Sachs, even if its greatness was put to the test last year.

Blankfein's spinning is reaching epic proportions. Several recent stories about Goldman have cast the firm as the Great Satan of the securities markets, or as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi put it, the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." No longer is Blankfein simply trying tell the world Goldman isn't the root of all evil; rather, old Lloyd is informing us all that Goldman is a source of goodness in the world. The exact quote, from the Times of London has Blankfein professing that as CEO of the vampire squid he's actually "doing God's work," simply by doing what banks get paid to do: Raising money for clients and investing in businesses.