Plan B Forum

Investment banking titan Goldman Sachs has become a "toxic and destructive" firm focused on milking clients for everything it can, a resigning executive has claimed in the New York Times.

Executive director Greg Smith said the Wall Street giant, which paid huge penalties for double-dealing with investors in mortgage securities during the financial crisis, had dumped its old culture of helping its customers make money.

Today, instead, customers are called "muppets" and staff talk about "ripping their clients off," Smith wrote in an opinion piece.

"I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

"To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money," he said.

And he named chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, and president, Gary Cohn, as responsible for the change. They "lost hold of the firm's culture on their watch," Smith said in the article, published on his last day at work for Goldman.

"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', sometimes over internal e-mail."

Smith said he had joined a very different Goldman nearly 12 years ago, one that had a culture centered on integrity and "always doing right by our clients."

"The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients' trust for 143 years."

Now the culture is all about raking in the bucks from clients and he sees "virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-bu ... z1p7jERzrJ