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Will no one let Goldman Sachs enjoy their moment? After news of their record earnings (and hefty compensation packages) broke yesterday, today the Goldman backlash begins in earnest, proving you can be too successful, too rich, and too pretty. “How long can Goldman keep it up?” Andrew Ross Sorkin asks on the Times DealBook blog. Meanwhile in the business section, Jenny Anderson uses Goldman CFO David Viniar’s remark yesterday about being “cautious” in the short term to go all negative Nancy. “For now, Goldman and its employees have much to celebrate,” she writes, going on to quote an analyst saying the bank can’t possibly do another “Houdini hedge escape” next year. That’s riiight. It’s never to early to worry about your future! Thanks, mom!
That fact that Goldman’s stock fell 3.4 percent on Tuesday has not escaped notice: “Goldman Sachs stumbled on Tuesday, as investors feared that the worst was yet to come,” Forbes warned in a piece festively titled “Goldman Shares Don’t Glitter.”
Naturally, the conspiracy theorists are taking the opportunity to have their say: “Goldman is not in profit at all. Cheating and deceiving Goldman’s accountants have created this paper profit so that they will be able to extract their astronomically huge bonuses this year,” wrote one commenter on DealBook. “SEC is bought and bribed by wall-street investment banks. We miss Eliot Spitzer. We need millions of Eliots so that they will go after these deceiving and cheating wall-street thieves.” Millions of Eliots. Ben Stein, is that you?
Well. As Harvard Business School professor Samuel Hayes informed us yesterday, it’s probably that everyone’s just jealous. (That’s right: Harvard.) And you know who’s probably really jealous? Morgan Stanley, which announced they lost $3.6 billion the same day that Goldman announced they earned $3.2 billion. DealJournal rubs it in: “One can’t help but think about the small band of traders that earned Goldman nearly $4 billion with some of the only right-way bets on subprime when we learn from Morgan CEO John Mack in his news release today that the lousy quarter was the result of ‘isolated losses by a small trading team in one part of the firm.’” Ouch.
C’mon, everyone, it’s Christmas! And by that we mean: Shouldn’t we all be sucking up so that our friends at Goldman Sachs will buy us presents?
Earlier: Isn’t Goldman Lucky?
