Laughter. You could hear it above the noise of traffic in Manhattan last month. Goldman Sachs had sweated bullets to deliver its first ever investor day. Rival bankers were tickled, not terrified. “Is that all they’ve got?” chuckled one. The pitch, led by chief executive David Solomon, was as slick as any Apple product launch. But the modesty of ambition — for group earnings to exceed capital costs by a few percentage points — signalled how badly the bank’s fortunes have waned.
In the noughties, Goldman Sachs figured as the world’s most powerful investment bank. Heads of state courted its bosses. Its share rating was stratospheric. During the financial crisis, hostility supplanted awe. The bank was “a great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity”, raged Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi.
The piece could have been written by Hunter S Thompson, if the gonzo journalist had been taking economics classes, not acid. But, like its subject, Mr Taibbi’s polemic has not aged well. It implied that Goldman was special in its ardour for networking and skimming rents from asset bubbles, the common pursuits of bankers for centuries. Moreover, Mr Taibbi’s fear that nothing would change has been proved wrong.