Mayor Bloomberg Defends Goldman Sachs After Greg Smith Editorial AP/The Huffington Post | By | Posted: 03/16/2012 9:56 am Updated:
NEW YORK -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the attention given to a Goldman Sachs' employee's scathing editorial about the company is "ridiculous." ”They’re a company that’s here to make money," he said. "That’s what they do.”
On his weekly appearance on WOR Radio Friday, Bloomberg said he had visited the Wall Street giant to express his support after an employee wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed that executives there referred to clients as "muppets" and put profits ahead of customers' interests. ‘Look, I’ve never worked at Goldman," he said, "but there’s an awful lot of people there that work very hard."
Bloomberg says people should keep in mind that most of the company's clients are sophisticated corporations and financial institutions.
Bloomberg says it's his job to support companies that provide a tax base for the city and employ its residents. He got his start on Wall Street.
In his widely circulated tell-all public resignation, Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs, Smith complained about the culture of Wall Street:
It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.