Some jobs are easy to understand. A plumber fixes pipes. An architect designs buildings. But if you’re an Operational Risk Analyst for the Finance and Securities division Goldman Sachs, as I am, nobody at a dinner party knows exactly what that entails. What we do at Goldman Sachs is very complex and highly technical, but essentially, it all boils down to taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.
Most people don’t have the slightest clue as to what we do at Goldman Sachs — are we an investment bank? Are we a money management fund? Are we a parasite sucking the life out of the middle class? It’s all of the above. Some days we’re advising business owners to close factories and cut jobs, and take the money saved and spend it on a very nice yacht. Other days we’re in Washington, letting Congressmen know that as fellow rich people, they stand to get even more rich by leaving us alone and letting us do our thing. Some days, we don’t even leave the office, and just wallow around in our own filthy, exquisite richness, like fat little pigs rolling around in the most decadent, gold-encrusted mud. But no matter what, we start each day by re-committing to our mission statement: make people who already have a lot of money, even more money.
It’s not that simple, though. We’re constantly coming up with financial innovations to help us siphon equity from the have-nots to the have-plentys. We’ve come a long way from the early days of Goldman, where we’d bundle risky mortgages for log cabins and pressure the rating agencies to rate them Twenty Three Skidoo. From MBS’s, to CDO’s, to the large claw attached to our Jersey City office building that picks up pedestrians and shakes the valuables out from their pockets, we’re always finding new ways to butt fuck the working poor into oblivion.
I’m hesitant to nutshell Goldman Sachs like this, because then people think that any jerk wanting to make a fast buck can do what we do. Far from it. Every Goldman employee has spent years eroding their morals and reassuring their conscience that they are just following orders while they systematically devour the global economy. I myself had to take countless tests on business ethics, and if I didn’t fail every single one, they’d have shown me the door. I came to Goldman wide-eyed and naïve, and after twenty five years, I’m a husk of a man incapable of looking another human being in the eye. I’m willing to kick a homeless person’s teeth out and then package them into a subprime mortgage bond. But we looked into the subprime tooth market and the margins were just too low.
When you simplify Goldman Sachs like this, we really do sound evil, but I assure you, we’re not. If you take the time to really understand us, you can see that we’re an intricate tapestry of insatiable greed, spiritual bankruptcy, and casual disdain for human life. And, if the margins improve, homeless person tooth securities.