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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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
I never thought I would tweet - I thought it was too dangerous.
Lloyd Blankfein
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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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
To the extent I bloomed, I'm a late bloomer.
Lloyd Blankfein -
You don't know how you'll react to things until you live through them.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
I started out as a lawyer and came in laterally to Goldman Sachs. So I learned myself that life is unpredictable. That you really should, in terms of your career, try to be excellent at what you're doing. I think if you focus on your job, and you focus on being broad in the context of your job, the next jobs follow from that.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein
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I would have liked to be a nerd. I didn't even make it to that.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
I've learned over the years that there's a lot of things that work out pretty well that I don't love.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
At the end of the day, it's not a normal condition to have interest rates at zero.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein
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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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein
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I remember, my first job when I got my working papers at 13 was as a vendor at Yankee Stadium - the old Yankee Stadium, with very steep stairs in the upper decks. It was all commission-based. And I think a soft drink was 25 cents, and I think you got a 10 percent or 11 percent commission.
Lloyd Blankfein -
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.
Lloyd Blankfein -
Ambition is your inner voice that tells you you can and should strive to go beyond your circumstances or station in life.
Lloyd Blankfein -
I am one with the popular culture.
Lloyd Blankfein