Goldman Sachs has no shortage of friends in high places, including New York's City Hall. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who made his early millions on Wall Street before turning them into billions at his own financial data and news company, threw his support behind the investment bank, still licking its wounds from a withering resignation letter by a Goldman Sachs employee in the New York Times.
Calling Goldman Sachs "a great firm," Bloomberg used a morning radio talk show on Friday to accuse critics of unfairly "piling on" the bank and said the former staffer, Greg Smith, was wrong to air his views in the op-ed piece. His firm, Bloomberg LP, competes with Thomson Reuters. "I thought (it was) a nasty letter from an employee," said Bloomberg, who regards loyalty as non-negotiable.
It was the second successive day Bloomberg stood behind Goldman Sachs. He visited bank's headquarters on Thursday to personally express his support to staffers. "You know, you go to work for a company, it seems to me they have an obligation to never diss you. They can part company with you. But they should never do that," said the mayor on The John Gambling Show radio show on WOR.
Smith, who worked in equity derivatives, said in the op-ed that Goldman had become "as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it" and was a place he no longer wished to work.
"It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as 'muppets,'" Smith wrote, using a term that is British slang for a stupid person.
The New York Times defended its decision to run the letter, which for days has been the subject of chatter around the water-cooler and across the web. "It's an op-ed piece," said spokeswoman Eileen Murphy. "It's someone's opinion. The purpose of an op-ed page is it's a forum for people to write their opinion on something." She also said the letter went through "the same process as any unsolicited op-ed would go through," although she declined to give details of the vetting procedure.
A person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified said the decision to run the letter was made by Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the paper's editorial page, and Trish Hall, the op-ed editor.
Smith made contact with the newspaper about a week before the letter was published, according to another source familiar with the matter. While it is not clear if Smith reached out to other media outlets, he told the New York Times he was in contact with another news organization.