Politics

Mayor Bloomberg Wants You To Stop Whining About Goldman Sachs

As much as I love to knock on corporate clones and toxic work environments, Mayor Michael Bloomberg raised a valid point Friday when he said the latest smear campaign on firm Goldman Sachs is “ridiculous.”

During a morning appearance on WOR Radio’s “John Gambling Show,” the New York politician spoke of a much-buzzed about Wednesday NYT column titled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs” and how the article hurts the otherwise “great firm.” The piece, which exploded on the Internet earlier this week and reminded us once again that working at Goldman Sachs brings about many soul-crushing experiences and diminishes one’s faith in humanity, asserts that the company’s employees called clients “muppets” who were useful for profit and little else. Bloomberg has his doubts about that claim:

“I don’t know whoever said what,” Bloomberg said. “But even if it was said, it’s a few people and, you know, Goldman Sachs is a firm that’s been around for well over a hundred years and it’s a great firm.”

Bloomberg added that it’s his duty to back job providers:

“It’s my job to stand up and support companies that are here in the city that bring us a tax base that employ our people and I’m going to do that.”

The widely-read and heavily discussed Goldman Sachs op-ed rehashed age-old questions about the ethics of staffers at powerhouse firms and argues that this particular place of employment has changed considerably since its writer began working there a little more than a decade ago:

“The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.”

So Goldman Sachs is more evil now than it was at the beginning of the millennium, but this piece of information isn’t news to anyone, even to those of us who have never dabbled in the brutal investment banking industry. The recession brought out the worst in our country, and firms have never been known as shiny happy places to work (ever seen “American Psycho” or “Wall Street”?).

TAGS: goldman sachs | michael bloomberg

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