Earlier this month, Alice Schroeder wrote a quasi-commentary, quasi-trend story for Bloomberg that began, inauspiciously, with a thirdhand anecdote from a Goldman Sachs banker. “The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank,” she wrote. “Has it really come to this?” As we suspected, no, it hasn’t.
The Journal’s Suzanne Craig did the actual legwork, and it seems like the story — in which Schroeder claims “her friend” says she wrote a reference for said banker to get a permit from the NYPD — may have been a complete fabrication:
New York police spokesman Paul J. Browne says that their records show only four Goldman employees have applied for gun permits in recent years — and the last application was made in 2003. “We haven’t seen a surge of applications of any kind for Goldman Sachs employees,” said Browne.
Schroeder is the author of The Snowball, the biography of Warren Buffett that the oracle was apparently displeased with. Neither have commented on that publicly, though Schroeder did tell the Dallas Morning News, “We’re still in touch with each other, but … it is not as frequent as before. You can conjecture what you want from that. I will not stop the conjecture.” Apparently she does that a lot.
