Lloyd Blankfein Quotes
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Growth requires risk-taking. If you want to dampen risk and make sure you never have a problem, you do so, but that also will have an effect on growth. This is a decision that doesn't necessarily belong to financial institutions. It belongs to regulators and legislators who represent the body politic.
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Mysterious can be cool, if you're in Hollywood and everyone's happy. But it can be really bad if people perceive that the financial interests are adversarial, that there's money versus people. A lot of Goldman Sachs people went into government, so at a time when there's a distrust of institutions, some of that reflects on us.
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I would have liked to be a nerd. I didn't even make it to that.
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You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.
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The ability for employment benefits to be shared among spouses, the ability to move people who are dependent on visas for trailing spouses, all hinges on being able to deal with families of gay people in the same way that you deal with families of straight people. Otherwise, they can't move around.
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Maybe bitcoin is a kind of a bubble. I don't like it. I'm not comfortable with it. I'm kind of an old dog to be absorbing that kind of a new trick.
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I never thought I would tweet - I thought it was too dangerous.
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Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.
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I am specifically concerned about the idea that the legislative process is one that gets characterized the way it is as the 'fiscal cliff.' At the end of the day, the United States is the biggest economy in the world, and the dollar is the reserve currency in the world. I think it behooves us to act in a much more responsible way.
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To the extent I bloomed, I'm a late bloomer.
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Ambition is your inner voice that tells you you can and should strive to go beyond your circumstances or station in life.
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I always had a lot of confidence in my ability to gauge a situation and people and try to understand them and what they were saying and what their context was.
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In markets, there are times when you are looking for what makes sense. At other times, you are looking for what you can do that is sensible versus constraints and uncertainties.
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With interest rates rising, gold doesn't pay an interest rate, but every other currency - it becomes not only less important to hold gold as an alternative, but more expensive to hold it as an insurance policy and so that will be a burden on the price of gold.
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If you had asked me, did I have everything nailed down and wired about what I wanted to do, and was I following some real plan? No. In fact, by the time I was in my mid-20s or even late-20s, and I was still in the law firm, I really was starting to get a little nervous that I didn't know what I was going to do.
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In my own experience, I plotted and planned my life when I was getting out of law school to know by what year I'd make it to the Supreme Court. That didn't work out the way I planned.
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The U.S. is not pure capitalism. In fact, there's no place for pure capitalism, unregulated capitalism. We have a regulated system.
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There's not a sport or activity in life where you have a really hard grip, you actually do better. Whether it's baseball or golf or kicking a ball, the looser you are, the further the thing goes... If you're tight, you're not necessarily better.
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I am one with the popular culture.
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It's very hard to go out and make big investments to take advantage of the shale energy if we don't know if it's always going to be there, what price it's going to be there, whether the country's going to allow it to be exported, or whether it's going to go and affect subsidized U.S. manufacturing.
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The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong.
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We've had this program for a number of years now, called 10,000 Small Businesses, where Goldman Sachs has convened a group of partners to basically give business education to small business owners.
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No one at Goldman Sachs gets paid out of his or her own P&L. It matters how your business is doing, but it matters more how the firm as a whole is doing.
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You can see that all these people who did really great things failed six times or didn't get going until they were much older. I think that's much more instructive and educational.