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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote
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. Lloyd Blankfein Read Quote