Streetwise Getting to and through Goldman Sachs

A noted banker on his career in global finance. Blankfein's memoir focuses on his 36 years at Goldman Sachs, the powerful financial services firm he headed until his 2018 retirement. The early pages are lively, but as he climbs the corporate ladder, cant creeps in. Raised in Brooklyn public housing, the self-described "urban hick" clipped coupons and marveled at the gizmos at the 1964 World's Fair in Queens. As a teenage Yankee Stadium vendor, he lugged trays of hot dogs to the upper deck. These winning anecdotes are followed by interesting stories from his days as a young lawyer working for 1970s music industry clients. Blankfein's chapters on Goldman concern subjects like innovations in foreign exchange markets, the pros and cons of being a publicly traded company, and complaints about "excessive" financial regulations. This material is guardedly informative but often dry. One section covers "the formation of a committee on strategy, a subcommittee of the operating committee." His account of Goldman's actions during the 2008 financial crisis will surely rankle some readers. The firm, he writes, survived because of its robust "culture around risk control," and it took a $10 billion loan under the federal government's Troubled Asset Relief Program because Washington insisted: "Goldman didn't need or want the capital." It was during this period that the company paid controversial bonuses to some staffers, a move he defends as "practical." Blankfein uses lazy stereotypes when describing his critics in the Occupy movement and euphemisms when discussing Goldman's annual firings, terming them "an exercise of moving the bottom 5 percent of performers out." After a promising start, C-suite jargon emerges as one of this book's major features. This account of a working-class kid's rise to the top of American banking has some heart--and plenty of corporate jargon. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.