Ambition is your inner voice that tells you you can and should strive to go beyond your circumstances or station in life.
Lloyd Blankfein
My favourite day is like when it's raining, and I can just lie on the couch.
As CEO of a big company, I have to be a kind of a champion of the interests of our people as insofar as their ability to do their job, to feel comfortable in their work environment, and to be able to fulfill their ambitions.
If you do something really well, the entire world beats a path to your door. The number three, number five, number 400 player gets nothing. It's almost a winner take all.
All you can do is the best you can do.
There is a line in which populism can cross over into demagoguery. Demagoguery is the crossover where populism becomes a bad thing, and people make things up, and they assign responsibilities that aren't fair and justified, and scapegoat communities. And then it becomes a very bad thing.
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.
With interest rates rising, gold doesn't pay an interest rate, but every other currency - it becomes not only less important to hold gold as an alternative, but more expensive to hold it as an insurance policy and so that will be a burden on the price of gold.
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.
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.
Businesses will ultimately go where the markets and opportunities are.
I would have liked to be a nerd. I didn't even make it to that.
I'm the chocolate chip cookie king of the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The list of things that are conventional today that I use every day that I thought would never make it is a very long list.
My - I grew up in - I grew up in public housing. My dad, for most of my life, worked for the post office, which was a terrific job to get because you couldn't lose your job.
When yields on corporate bonds are lower than dividends on stocks, that unnerves me.
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.
Maybe bitcoin is a kind of a bubble. I don't like it. I'm not comfortable with it. I'm kind of an old dog to be absorbing that kind of a new trick.
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.
You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses' goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more.
Let me tell you, there's very few places where I don't have an agenda.
I've learned over the years that there's a lot of things that work out pretty well that I don't love.
I am one with the popular culture.
Every time I get accustomed to low volatility, like we were towards the end of the Greenspan era, and we think we have all the levers under the control... something erupts to remind us that the idea that anybody is in control of everything is hubris.
Change is often the agent of progress in ways we can't always readily see in the early days.
In 2007, in the early 2007, everybody saw the housing market was falling, and at any given moment a lot of people thought it was going to fall more, and a lot of people thought it was going to rebound. You just didn't know.
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.
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.
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.
I'd say if you wanted to forestall bad events, the best thing to do is anticipate them and try to correct them before they get close.
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.
Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It's a virtuous cycle.
At the end of the day, it's not a normal condition to have interest rates at zero.
I don't look forward to a time when every politician, every legislator goes to Washington absolutely committed to an extreme point of view. Elected representatives are sent to Washington to compromise, not to never compromise.
I got into Goldman really by acquisition because I had gone - I grew up in east New York in the Linden Projects - I did go to fancy schools, but my resume wasn't up to a Wall Street set of resumes. I went to college. I went to law school and practiced for a while.
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.
I read a lot of history, and I know that once upon a time, a coin was worth $5 if it had $5 worth of gold in it. Now we have paper that is just backed by fiat... Maybe in the new world, something gets backed by consensus.
Growth requires risk-taking. If you want to dampen risk and make sure you never have a problem, you do so, but that also will have an effect on growth. This is a decision that doesn't necessarily belong to financial institutions. It belongs to regulators and legislators who represent the body politic.
There is a tradition in America of people in business not only commenting on the way the government is being run but doing something about it if they don't like it. In fact, they don't just rail about it: they go into government, like some of my ex-colleagues.
The U.S. is not pure capitalism. In fact, there's no place for pure capitalism, unregulated capitalism. We have a regulated system.
I always thought that a prep school was what some people went to after high school to prepare themselves for college.
To the extent I bloomed, I'm a late bloomer.
The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong.
If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems.
Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.
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.
