You gotta laugh. After making billions of dollars helping Greece go broke and paying out mega bonuses, Goldman Sachs has come out in its annual report claiming that bad publicity is now now of its big business risks.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, it's the latest sign of Goldman's whipping-boy status among rivals, lawmakers and angry Americans because of the firm's giant profits.
Not surprisingly, Goldman Sachs has recruited the best corporate spin merchants to try and deflect some of the damage. The New York Post reports that Goldman Sachs has turned to a fancy Texas PR firm Public Strategies to try and gauge where it stands in the market. The Post's Mark DeCambre reports: "Earlier this month, Goldman clients and Wall Street analysts starting filling out an exhaustive, online questionnaire seeking to pinpoint exactly what people thought of Blankfein's firm. One question wanted survey participants to compare Goldman to other Wall Street banks — and names rivals JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Bank of America, Citigroup and Barclays. Respondents were asked to fill in blanks from least favorable to most favorable."
Still, public relations can't work miracles. Not when the firm has rejected shareholder demands that it rein in those obscene executive bonuses.
And not when the company chief Lloyd Blankfein came out out last year and told a London newspaper he was "doing God's work". Come to think of it, the then Enron CEO Jeff Skilling said the same thing: "We were doing something special, magical. We were changing the world. We were doing God's work," Skilling said. Presumably God is keeping him company in jail now.
Lloyd Blankfein and Jeff Skilling, the Blues Brothers on a mission from God. And with that legacy, Goldman Sachs will not fix its reputation
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