Monday, May 18, 2015

Here's a Twist: Goldman Sachs Concerned About Revolving Door Ethics ...

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein


...when the government-crony Wall Street revolving door is working against the bankster firm.

A trader points me to a Bloomberg article, reporting on the GS concern:
The New York Federal Reserve’s lead supervisor of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has quit for a job advising other financial firms, triggering concerns within the Wall Street bank that some of its business secrets might not stay so secret.
After learning last month that the examiner, Lance Auer, was joining the financial services practice of PwC, Goldman Sachs asked the firm whether he faced any restrictions on working for other banks, said two people familiar with the discussion. Auer, Goldman Sachs pointed out, had gleaned insights into operations and risk-management strategies that could be useful to competitors, the people said.
Goldman Sachs’s anxiety is a new twist on the debate over the revolving door where the usual complaint is that Wall Street benefits from hiring government insiders....Auer, who is scheduled to start at PwC in June, was stationed inside Goldman Sachs’s headquarters.

This is how it usually works. Ben White at Politico reported in 2013:
 Goldman Sachs...will soon have top-level executives with the ear of the CEO who once occupied senior jobs in the White House and United States Treasury.... Jake Siewert, managing director and head of corporate communications at Goldman Sachs..., who served as counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and in multiple roles including press secretary under President Bill Clinton, has quietly helped revolutionize the way the famously secretive Goldman Sachs interacts with the public.
CEO Lloyd Blankfein is now a regular at events around Washington, including the recent Investment Company Institute gathering and a private meeting at the White House late last year...
Many other high profile Wall Street firms are joining the hunt for political veterans from both Washington and New York. 
A very short list of other top political operatives now working in and around Wall Street includes: Ed Skyler, former deputy New York City mayor for operations, who is now executive vice president for global public affairs at Citigroup; Calvin Mitchell, who ran press operations for Geithner at the New York Federal Reserve and is now global co-head of corporate communications at Credit Suisse; Jennifer Zuccarelli, formerly of the Paulson Treasury department and Mark Kornblau, a veteran of multiple Democratic presidential campaigns, who both now have senior roles at JPMorganChase. Andrew Williams, a former Geithner spokesman, now works for Siewert at Goldman.
And there are many more.
  -RW

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