Jason Reed/Reuters
13 November 2013
In an amazing mea culpa, Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein has said he regrets the bank’s involvement in some complex financial products ahead of the financial crash in 2008.
Goldman paid $550 million (£345 million) to the Securities and Exchange Commission over its collateralised debt obligation vehicle Abacus, which the regulator said defrauded clients.Blankfein said: “I wish the organisation hadn’t done complex CDOs. And, post-crisis, I wish I had gotten a little quicker off the mark in describing who we were and what we did as a firm and how we looked to the world before everybody defined us for us.”
He told industry trade body Sifma: “We were competing against an existing narrative — it’s very hard to get out of [that].”
