Transparency is alien to Goldman Sachs culture of success

You can almost admire the besieged chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein who now has no alternative but to try to talk his firm out of its legal, and increasingly political quagmire.

He is making some sensible points and would rate quite highly as a democratic politician. Yet the trouble about the culture of success at Goldman Sachs is that it is indefensible to the average person.

You can make the case that finance makes things happen. You can also make the case that too much finance is not a good thing. Blankfein himself admitted in another Bloomberg interview that ‘too much leverage’ was the root cause of the global financial crisis.

Goldman’s very success in surviving, and indeed thriving through the crisis is its undoing. How is this done? Can it be done legally or in a way acceptable to public morality?

The trouble for Goldman is the more it explains the deeper the hole it is digging becomes. This is the start of a witch hunt and if markets turn down again now, as ArabianMoney thinks inevitable then Goldman is going to take the blame, however unfairly and however transparent the firm becomes.