News & blog

On Friday I visited Stanford bookstore, which is a awesome place for a book lover. One of the books that sticked to me was was by the man named Greg Smith. Earlier this year, as some people might recall, he did cause  a lot of commotion because of the following:

On the march 14, 2012 a Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith published an op-ed article[1] claiming that the culture of his company has, since the dawn of financial crisis, shifted from being customer centric into a kind of predator culture, where the interest of traders comes first (making money) and where customers needs comes last. In the book published later that year Smith tells in a nutshell the story of the financial rollercoaster that the Western world experienced in the course of the financial crisis, now extended to public debt crisis.[2]

Smith points out how it was exactly the culture of the company that had helped Goldman Sachs to stand out among peers and become world most powerful investment bank.  In those days, it was the culture of humility, respect for the facts and principle to take advantage of the customer in any dealings. In other words, the earlier GS did promote the ethics of integrity and transparency.  Smith noted that all of this eroded as people in the company started – in the face of the crisis – to protect their own earning at all price.

The story is symptomatic for today’s world of economic downturn. The mood of the markets and people have seriously flawed and future seems rather gloomy for most of the people.  As the students of socionomics know, social mood has a certain anticipatory power to forecast what actually happens in the market place[3]. Most of the assessment regarding the future options for European economy in particular do not see much light at the end of the tunnel.[4]