Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The investment bank Goldman Sachs is back at the center of public attention again over questions about its culture and business practices and whether it and other firms are too focused on their own profits.
As the New York Stock Exchange opened this morning, the financial world was still buzzing about an op-ed article in yesterday's New York Times. Greg Smith, a vice president at Goldman Sachs in Europe, resigned with a series of broadsides aimed at the bank.
He wrote that the firm cares about money, not about its customers -- quote -- "I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients," he said. "It's purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them."
Smith did not accuse Goldman of anything illegal, but he said CEO Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn had -- quote -- "lost hold of the firm's culture on their watch." And he warned that the decline in the firm's moral fiber is the single biggest threat to its survival.
In response, Blankfein and Cohn issued a public letter to employees, saying, "We are far from perfect, but where the firm has seen a problem, we have responded to it seriously and substantively. And we have demonstrated that fact."
But former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said yesterday that Goldman's character changed after it went public in 1999.
PBS Newshour 3/15/2012
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