City profile

Lloyd Blankfein It’s the end of an era at Goldman Sachs, said the FT: CEO Lloyd Blankfein is stepping down after 12 years in the post. Most departing bosses are rated by how their companies grew, or the returns reaped by investors. “On both of these metrics, Blankfein is unexceptional.” He’ll be measured instead against his peers at Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, who failed to steer their firms to safety during the 2008 financial crisis. One of Goldman’s “unique strengths” then was Blankfein’s “ability to keep his head when others were losing theirs”. Colleagues remember the New Yorkborn former risk manager as “consistently calm and maintaining his sense of humour throughout”. “Some top bankers cultivate a hushed and patrician vibe,” said Bloomberg. But Blankfein, 63, “sports a rubbery face that twists into snarls or grins, and he wisecracks more than his peers”. In 2009, a year after taxpayers bailed out the big banks, he told a reporter that his firm was doing “God’s work”. It was “an indelible moment of the post-crisis era” – a humorous aside that entrenched Goldman’s reputation, in the words of Rolling Stone, as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”. Remarkably, Blankfein survived to begin repositioning Goldman away from risky but profitable trading activities. The new focus is on tech-driven consumer and retail banking, but it will be up to his successor, David Solomon, to drive it. Blankfein jokes that for his next move he’d like to become mayor of New York City – if only he didn’t have to run for the job.