Money and Power - How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World

Informationen zum Autor William D. Cohan Klappentext The bestselling author of the acclaimed House of Cards and The Last Tycoons turns his spotlight on to Goldman Sachs and the controversy behind its success. From the outside! Goldman Sachs is a perfect company. The Goldman PR machine loudly declares it to be smarter! more ethical! and more profitable than all of its competitors. Behind closed doors! however! the firm constantly straddles the line between conflict of interest and legitimate deal making! wields significant influence over all levels of government! and upholds a culture of power struggles and toxic paranoia. And its clever bet against the mortgage market in 2007-unknown to its clients-may have made the financial ruin of the Great Recession worse. Money and Power reveals the internal schemes that have guided the bank from its founding through its remarkable windfall during the 2008 financial crisis. Through extensive research and interviews with the inside players! including current CEO Lloyd Blankfein! William Cohan constructs a nuanced! timely portrait of Goldman Sachs! the company that was too big-and too ruthless-to fail. Leseprobe Wall Street has always been a dangerous place. Firms have been going in and out of business ever since speculators ?rst gathered under a button­wood tree near the southern tip of Manhattan in the late eighteenth century. Despite the ongoing risks, during great swaths of its mostly charmed 142 years, Goldman Sachs has been both envied and feared for having the best talent, the best clients, and the best political connections, and for its ability to alchemize them into extreme pro?tability and market prowess. Indeed, of the many ongoing mysteries about Goldman Sachs, one of the most overarching is just how it makes so much money, year in and year out, in good times and in bad, all the while revealing as little as pos­sible to the outside world about how it does it. Another— equally confounding— mystery is the ?rm’s steadfast, zealous belief in its ability to manage its multitude of internal and external con?icts better than any other beings on the planet. The combination of these two genetic strains— the ability to make boatloads of money at will and to appear to manage con?icts that have humbled, then humiliated lesser ?rms— has made Goldman Sachs the envy of its ?nancial- services brethren. But it is also something else altogether: a symbol of immutable global power and unparalleled connections, which Goldman is shame­less in exploiting for its own bene?t, with little concern for how its suc­cess affects the rest of us. The ?rm has been described as everything from “a cunning cat that always lands on its feet” to, now famously, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” by Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. The ?rm’s inexorable success leaves people wondering: Is Goldman Sachs better than everyone else, or have they found ways to win time and time again by cheating? But in the early twenty- ?rst century, thanks to the fallout from Goldman’s very success, the ?rm is looking increasingly vulnerable. To be sure, the ?rm has survived plenty of previous crises, starting with the Depression, when much of the ?rm’s capital was lost in a scam of its own creation, and again in the late 1940s, when Goldman was one of seven­teen Wall Street ?rms put on trial and accused of collusion by the federal government. In the past forty years, as a consequence of numerous scan­dals involving rogue traders, suicidal clients, and charges of insider trad­ing, the ?rm has come far closer— repeatedly— to ?nancial collapse than its reputation would attest. Each of these previous threats changed Goldman in some meaning­ful way and forced the ?rm to adapt to the new laws that either the mar­ket or regulators imposed. This time will be no d...

Détails du produit

• Auteurs: William D Cohan, William D. Cohan
• Edition: Anchor Books USA
• Langues: Anglais
• Format d'édition: Poche format B
• Sortie: 31.01.2012
• EAN: 9780767928267
• ISBN: 978-0-7679-2826-7
• Pages: 816
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 235 mm x 28 mm
• Thèmes: Anchor Books; ANCHOR
• Catégorie: Sciences sociales, droit, économie > Economie > Général, dictionnaires