Lloyd Blankfein’s oldest son quietly landed one of the best jobs in finance

Remember Alex Blankfein? He’s the 30 year old son of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Last time we caught up with him, he’d spent around three years at Goldman Sachs working in cross asset sales, followed by an MBA at Harvard Business School, followed by a job at Bain & Co. Now though, he’s working as a senior associate at Carlyle Group – one of the world’s most prestigious private equity companies.

Alex Blankfein’s arrival at Carlyle isn’t recent – according to his publicly available profile he joined from Bain in April last year. However, it appears to have gone unnoticed by the world’s media. Carlyle updated its page relating to Alex Blankfein last week. He’s working on Carlyle’s U.S. Equity Opportunities team, is ‘focused on a broad range of middle-market buyout transactions,’ and is based in New York City.

Private equity jobs are notoriously difficult to get and Carlyle is one of the most selective hirers of the lot. Alex Blankfein’s move may have been indirectly facilitated by his father’s closeness to David Rubenstein, Carlyle’s founder. Rubenstein interviewed Lloyd Blankfein last month for his Bloomberg-hosted chat show.

Speaking at a London School of Economics conference last year, Rubenstein said the people who succeed in private equity are those who are in it for love rather than money: “You have to really love what you’re doing and you won’t find what you love until you’ve experimented a bit. Find something you really enjoy and then you can make a career out of it.” In this, Rubenstein echoed Lloyd Blankfein’s own careers advice from several years earlier: success comes from being a “complete person”, said Blankfein in 2013, adding that young people should have a “few years of experimentation.”

In 2013 Blankfein said his own children ignored his careers wisdom. In fact, it seems Alex was listening: Blankfein’s oldest son has experimented by notching up a range of top brands. He’s worked for a top name investment bank, taken a top name MBA, joined a top name consultancy firm, and now he’s at a top name private equity firm. Other millennials may want to take note.

http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/267151/lloyd-blankfeins-oldest-son-has-quietly-landed-one-of-the-best-jobs-in-finance/

The Goldman Sachs power players behind Lloyd Blankfein

by Portia Crowe and Matt Turner 

A Goldman Sachs executive considered a potential candidate to succeed CEO Lloyd Blankfein said this week he was retiring from the firm. Michael Sherwood, a vice chairman and co-CEO of Goldman Sachs International, decided to retire after 30 years at the firm, according to an internal memo. 

In case his departure raises any questions about who might eventually take the reins after Blankfein, who is 62 and says he has no plans to retire, we have put together a list of the key executives at the firm. These are the key people behind the big three at Goldman: Blankfein, CFO Harvey Schwartz, and president Gary Cohn. 

They come from across the firm — banking, sales and trading, investment management, and even technology. They've worked around the world and now are based mostly in New York and London. Check out Goldman Sachs' top power players, listed below in alphabetical order...

http://www.afr.com/leadership/the-goldman-sachs-power-players-behind-lloyd-blankfein-20161124-gsx70d

Excerpts of Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speeches to Goldman Sachs Finally Leaked

EXCERPTS OF HILLARY Clinton’s remarks during paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and other groups were leaked online Friday afternoon by WikiLeaks. Clinton, who was paid upwards of $225,000 per speech, earned more than $22 million on the paid speaking circuit after resigning as secretary of state.

The excerpts are revealed in an email from Tony Carrk, the research director of the Clinton campaign, to John Podesta, the campaign chairman, and other top campaign officials. Carrk, who did not respond to a request for comment, highlighted in the memo the most politically damaging quotes from each paid speech, under headers including “CLINTON ADMITS SHE IS OUT OF TOUCH,” “CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY,” and “CLINTON REMARKS ARE PRO KEYSTONE AND PRO TRADE.”

The wealth Clinton accumulated was a topic at the paid events.

Discussing middle class economic anxieties, Clinton told a crowd at a Goldman Sachs-sponsored speech that she is now “kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

But the discussions were also an opportunity for Clinton to speak candidly about policy, politics, and her approach to governing.

Touching on her view of developing financial regulations, Clinton declared to a crowd of Goldman Sachs bankers that in order to “figure out what works,” the “people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”

At the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovators Summit, Clinton responded to a question from chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, who quipped that you “go to Washington” to “make a small fortune.” Clinton agreed with the comment and complained about ethics rules that require officials to divest from certain assets before entering government. “There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Clinton said...

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/excerpts-of-hillary-clintons-paid-speeches-to-goldman-sachs-finally-leaked/

Here's why it seems like the CEO of Wells Fargo can't remember anything

John Stumpf — the CEO of what was once Wall Street's most squeaky-clean bank, Wells Fargo — was in front of Congress on Tuesday answering for the fraudulent actions of thousands of employees.

It's yet another exhausting example of how people working at a bank got up in the morning, cheated and lied to their customers, went home to their families, ate dinner, were fairly normal, went to bed, and then got up in the morning to lie and cheat at work again.

Here's what happened at Wells Fargo: Under intense pressure to meet performance targets from above, thousands of employees opened fake accounts for clients.

The bank has agreed to pay a fine of $125 million (peanuts, really, at a company with a market capitalization of $235 billion), and thousands — excluding the executives who ran this division, of course — were fired.

In front of Congress, Stumpf was apologetic but weak and ineffectual.

He said Wells Fargo was dealing with the issue for a number of years before he was made aware of the issue. "If I could turn the clock back, I — we all — wish we had done something earlier," Stumpf said.

And then he said something that you could've seen coming. He couldn't remember details. Specifically, Stumpf said he couldn't remember when exactly in 2013 he learned about the issue. He was repeatedly asked if he had known before the Los Angeles Times published a story on the practices, but he didn't answer.

This, you see, is a Wall Street coping mechanism. It also happens to beget more disastrous behavior...

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-wells-fargos-stumpf-cant-remember-much-about-what-happened-2016-9

Hillary Clinton Won’t Say How Much Goldman Sachs CEO Invested With Her Son-in-Law

WHEN HILLARY CLINTON’S son-in-law sought funding for his new hedge fund in 2011, he found financial backing from one of the biggest names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.

The fund, called Eaglevale Partners, was founded by Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and two of his partners. Blankfein not only personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to be used in the fund’s marketing.

The investment did not turn out to be a savvy business decision. Earlier this month, Mezvinsky was forced to shutter one of the investment vehicles he launched under Eaglevale, called Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity, after losing 90 percent of its money betting on the Greek recovery. The flagship Eaglevale fund has also lost money, according to the New York Times.

There has been minimal reporting on the Blankfein investment in Eaglevale Partners, which is a private fund that faces few disclosure requirements. At a campaign rally in downtown San Francisco on Thursday, I attempted to ask Hillary Clinton if she knew the amount that Blankfein invested in her son-in-law’s fund.

Watch the video:

The Intercept How much did Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein invest in Hillary Clinton's son-in-law's hedge fund? from The Intercept on Vimeo.


https://theintercept.com/2016/05/27/hillary-clinton-wont-say-how-much-goldman-sachs-ceo-invested-with-her-son-in-law/

Why the S.E.C. Didn’t Hit Goldman Sachs Harder

In the late summer of 2009, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission were preparing to bring charges in what they expected would be their first big crackdown coming out of the financial crisis. The investigators had been looking into Goldman Sachs’s mortgage-securities business, and were preparing to take on the bank over a complex deal, known as Abacus, that it had arranged with a hedge fund. They believed that Goldman had committed securities violations in developing Abacus, and were ready to charge the firm.

James Kidney, a longtime S.E.C. lawyer, was assigned to take the completed investigation and bring the case to trial. Right away, something seemed amiss. He thought that the staff had assembled enough evidence to support charging individuals. At the very least, he felt, the agency should continue to investigate more senior executives at Goldman and John Paulson & Company, the hedge fund run by John Paulson that made about a billion dollars from the Abacus deal. In his view, the S.E.C. staff was worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an e-mail from Reid Muoio, the head of the S.E.C.’s team looking into complex mortgage securities. Muoio, who had worked at the agency for years, told colleagues that he had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.” This attitude agitated Kidney, and he felt that it held his agency back from pursuing the people who made the decisions that led to the financial collapse.

While the S.E.C., as well as federal prosecutors, eventually wrenched billions of dollars from the big banks, a vexing question remains: Why did no top bankers go to prison? Some have pointed out that statutes weren’t strong enough in some areas and resources were scarce, and while there is truth in those arguments, subtler reasons were also at play. During a year spent researching for a book on this subject, I’ve come across case after case in which regulators were reluctant to use the laws and resources available to them. Members of the public don’t have a full sense of the issue, because they rarely get to see how such decisions are made inside government agencies.

Kidney was on the inside at a crucial moment. Now retired after decades of service to the S.E.C., Kidney recently provided me with a cache of internal documents and e-mails about the Abacus investigation. The agency holds the case up as a success, and in some ways it was: Goldman had to pay a five-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar fine, and a low-ranking trader was found liable for violating securities laws. But the documents provided by Kidney show that S.E.C. officials considered and rejected a much broader case against Goldman and John Paulson & Company.

Kidney has criticized the S.E.C. publicly in the past, and the agency’s handling of the Abacus case has been previously described, most thoroughly in a piece by Susan Beck, in The American Lawyer, but the documents provided by Kidney offer new details about how the S.E.C. handled its case against Goldman. The S.E.C. declined to comment on the e-mails or the Abacus investigation, citing its policies not to comment on individual probes. In a recent interview with me, Muoio stood by the agency’s investigation and its case. “Results matter,” he said. “It was a clear win against a company and culpable individual. We put it to a jury and won.”...

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-the-s-e-c-didnt-hit-goldman-sachs-harder

Lloyd Blankfein Question at FCIC Hearing 1/13/2010.mov

Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein closes on his purchase in Manhattan's 15 Central Park West celebrity tower; honcho pays $26M for his unit

via bergproperties.com