[Originally posted at Beltway Confidential]
In case you missed my columns explaining why Goldman will come out on the winning side of financial “reform” (here and here), or in case you actually believed the President’s rhetoric, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of the nation’s largest investment bank, Goldman Sachs, put it very directly in a conference call today with private wealth-management clients on which the blog ClusterStock was listening in:
“We will be among the biggest beneficiaries of reform”
Of course, there’s plenty of context needed here. Blankfein wants more clients, and with regulation being inevitable, he has incentive to claim he won’t be hurt by it.
Also Blankfein can publicly say what many regulator robber barons say, something to the effect of well, regulation strengthens the whole system, and so everyone benefits, the best players moreso. This is almost always BS. Usually, the biggest businesses understand that they will get to tweak the details of the “reform” more than the smaller, less well-connected guys, and that regulation, by imposing new costs, crowds out the little guys.
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