In 2014, Lloyd Blankfein, then chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, said in a television interview that economic growth was what made Goldman grow, “and so naturally we chase growth around the world”.
It’s a phrase that Blankfein clearly liked — never mind that it could be read as an anodyne, boardroom-friendly version of Matt Taibbi’s famous description of the firm as a “vampire squid…relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.
