Will Goldman Sachs unleash another exec on weary public in the form of a senior administration advisor or even cabinet official? CEO Lloyd Blankfein isn’t ruling it out, hinting he might like the job, just not any time soon.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, Blankfein said he had no plans to leave Goldman: “The combination of this being who I am and what I do and having absolutely no other interests makes me think this is what I’ll be doing for a while.”
But he also noted that while he “would love to be wanted” for the role of Treasury Secretary, he diplomatically added that it “seems like such a distant hypothetical.”
Blankfein on what his next move will be:
“Could you imagine giving up all this? Of course not. The combination of this being who I am and what I do and having absolutely no other interests makes me think I want to be doing this for a while.”
On whether he might be Treasury Secretary one day:
“I would love to be wanted. And that seems like such a distant hypothetical at this point, I’ll sort of end it there.”
On whether he ever wonders why CEOs like Tim Cook don’t get the same scrutiny that bank CEOs do:
“I’ll tell you, here’s another slogan that’s trite. It is what it is. We are a very key part, again, of our own industry and help drive other people’s industry. When things go well, we’ve gotten a lot of credit. People of our industry also have made a lot of money in the past when things went well.
You could debate who caused what and how many people contributed, but we were certainly near the scene of an accident, and you can debate who contributed and what other things, who could have told what, but you know something? The trauma was very recent. There’s going to be a lot of focus on us for a while, and you know something? That also goes with the territory.
So pointing finger and acting defensive and saying, gosh, I wish it wasn’t here, the way I’m trying to live is I want to spend most of my time learning forward, trying to help finance businesses that will improve the economy and those companies, that will improve the health and welfare of people in this country and world. And guess what? I’m not going to outrun the legacy issues, and we’ll have to deal with those also. But it’s not going to be 90% legacy, 10% the future.” On whether the Facebook deal was a good miss for Goldman Sachs:
“We were an underwriter as well. Let me say this. An IPO is the beginning of a life of a public company. It is not the end of it. We regard Facebook as a very important client and a franchise account, and we will continue to try to be all over them and help them do their business. It is certainly one of the more important new companies to become public in the United States over the last several years.”
On Tim Cook sitting with Michelle Obama at the State of the Union address and whether Blankfein should be considered an innovator in the same respect: