By Martin Vogel
Greg Smith had been working for Goldman Sachs for twelve years before he published the resignation letter yesterday which has caused a furore.
It presents a devastating portrait of a corporate culture that is entirely self-serving and betraying the interests of its clients:
“I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.
“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.”