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- [00:00]
Joe Weisenthal
Running a business means dealing with a lot of overly complicated Software, and most CRMs tend to follow the same pattern. They're packed with endless features, you'll never use interfaces that feel clunky, and teams end up spending way too much time just trying to find basic information. Today's sponsor, pipedrive is a simple CRM tool designed for small and medium businesses. Pipedrive brings you entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear, complete view of sales processes and customer information. Designed to help teams stay in control and close more deals faster. It's it all centers around the visual sales pipeline, where you can see every deal, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next. Since everything is in one platform, pipedrive is designed to unite your team, keep track of sales tasks and stay on top of your leads. Switch to a CRM built by Salespeople for Salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipedrive right now. You'll get a 30 day free trial, no credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.comsimpleCRM to get started. That's pipedrive.comsimpleCRm so there's a lot of
- [01:01]
IBM Representative
noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises, so let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now a global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94% of common questions, not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Lets create smarter business IBM this podcast
- [01:31]
Wise Representative
is brought to you by wise, the Smarter way to manage your money internationally. If you're getting a headache from juggling different currencies and different bank accounts in different countries, there's a better way to receive money in the currency you need without the slow transfer times or hidden fees. Meet wise, the savvy way to handle your money internationally. Hold balances in up to 40 currencies with the mid market exchange rate on every conversion. Whether you're receiving payments from tenants abroad, earning as a digital nomad, or converting dividends from your international the Wise Multi Currency account is for you. Be Smart, Get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com Terms and Conditions apply.
- [02:11]
Cincinnati Insurance Representative
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.
- [02:27]
Tracy Alloway
Hey there odd lots listeners. This is Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal. We are very pleased to bring you a live recording of the podcast that was part of Bloomberg Invest. That's our flagship Investment conference over here at Bloomberg. And we truly had the perfect guest. Someone I've wanted to interview for a very long time. Never got the chance. It is, of course, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein.
- [02:52]
Joe Weisenthal
Take a listen, Joe.
- [02:53]
Tracy Alloway
I have a confession to make.
- [02:55]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Yeah, go on.
- [02:56]
Tracy Alloway
This is probably the most nervous I've ever been for an Odd Lots episode.
- [02:59]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Are you for real?
- [03:00]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah. And I'll tell you why. And actually, the reason why you'll know, because you want to know.
- [03:05]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
I do know.
- [03:05]
Tracy Alloway
The first time Joe and I ever met Lloyd Blankfein in person was at a sort of media roundtable. And for some reason, I felt it incumbent upon myself to tell a joke.
- [03:14]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Well, you were late, too.
- [03:15]
Tracy Alloway
Oh, I was.
- [03:16]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
You came in late.
- [03:17]
Tracy Alloway
All right. I forgot that part. I like that I told a joke to try to, you know, make it up. I guess probably the joke was at Goldman's expense. At which point Lloyd leaned forward on the table and he said, let me tell you how I would have made that joke funny. And the worst part was he then made a very, very good joke that was a lot funnier than what I had just said.
- [03:38]
Lloyd Blankfein
Oh, I think I said, you're supposed to. You should put the punchline at the end, not at the beginning.
- [03:43]
Tracy Alloway
That's right.
- [03:43]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Wait, can we actually talk about what the joke was, the context of the joke? Because I remember it well.
- [03:48]
Tracy Alloway
Go on.
- [03:49]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
So the whole reason that the media roundtable happened was that apparently Lloyd was supposed to be in China for some reason, and something happened, like someone from the UK was there, and Lloyd's schedule got changed. And so they. At the last second, they're like, oh, maybe some reporters will bring in. And then the joke that Tracy made was something about having to like, oh, were you going to go there to recruit princelings for Goldman Sachs? Which at the time was, you know, one of those scandals out there.
- [04:16]
Tracy Alloway
I swear it was better than that.
- [04:18]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
But that was the theme of the joke. It was. It was at Goldman's expense.
- [04:21]
Tracy Alloway
All right, so we all learned our lesson, which is don't try to be funnier than Lloyd, because he'll beat you at it every time. But, Lloyd, congratulations on the book.
- [04:28]
Lloyd Blankfein
Well, thank you.
- [04:28]
Tracy Alloway
Very exciting to be speaking with you. One thing I learned from the book is that you're spending your time trading now. And when I read that, I sort of had a vision of you on your phone on Robin Hood. Trading. Trading, like zero day options or something like that. What are you actually trading and where?
- [04:45]
Lloyd Blankfein
Well, I'm sort of committed to Goldman. I Would be on Robinhood. Except for the history. No, to me, that's one of the occupational hazards of my prior life, is that I watch markets all the time. I watch markets at night while I'm asleep, and so I know the price of everything all the time, and I trade. But it's not like when you say, spend your time trading. No, it's just background noise while I'm having a conversation in my life with people I hang around with. Sometimes in business, it is not considered rude that if you're talking to somebody, you're not looking at them, but looking at a screen or a phone or something like that, that's kind of. Okay. So it's like, I work with Joe.
- [05:24]
Tracy Alloway
I know.
- [05:24]
Lloyd Blankfein
So doing that, when somebody says, what percentage of your time? Your time, it's like listening to music. You can listen to music while you're doing something else. So it adds up to more than 100%.
- [05:35]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
What are you trading? We're not here for stock recommendations, but, like, what's interesting in markets and such that you feel compelled to click buttons and try to anticipate moves?
- [05:45]
Lloyd Blankfein
Well, I was always kind of a Mac. I mean, I came up through what we call them, the macro markets. The large things, interest rates, government policy, fiscal. The sort of stuff that kind of moves all assets together, although there's always differences. So that's my background, but I mean, with themes. I mean, everybody now is in tech because if you weren't in tech, you'd be bankrupt because you'd be wrong for all this time. So everybody is. Given how the markets have moved sort of consistently for a very long time, I can tell you what everybody is kind of in. And of course, I could tell you who's getting hurt at any given part when it gets upset for a day, but I'm in. Probably things that wouldn't surprise you, but maybe the biggest surprise is that I'm all in, you know, so, like, I'm always 100% in equities. Now, risk assets. That's what. That's what you say. Risk assets.
- [06:35]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Risk assets, yeah.
- [06:36]
Lloyd Blankfein
Risky assets.
- [06:37]
Tracy Alloway
Well, so after you retired from Goldman, some people were surprised that you didn't choose to go into politics. Like, 70 years.
- [06:44]
Lloyd Blankfein
Yeah.
- [06:44]
Tracy Alloway
Well, explain that. Like, why did you. You took a proper break when you left Goldman.
- [06:50]
Lloyd Blankfein
Yeah. Well, let me tell you, if somebody gave me something overwhelmingly interesting and fun, I might have done it. Five of my last six predecessors either went into the Cabinet, except for John Corzine, who became senator of New Jersey, but Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson treasury secretaries and whatnot. I came out in the. I stopped in 2018, end of 2000. So the second half of Trump won. The beginning of Trump won. The economic team was Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, all ex Goldman. So I think we had had enough of that. And I certainly didn't want. I didn't want to add myself to the list at that point. And so kind of drifted on. Then I drifted through Covid. And I say, you know, I kind of like this, you know, not sending an alarm clock in the morning and Saturday afternoon, having lunch with people and not having to go to the airport on a Saturday afternoon so I could get to Beijing first thing Monday morning. And so it's easy to get used to sloth.
- [07:44]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
So here's the thing. I get not taking some big job after retirement. Like, I totally get that. I get wanting to trade, and that sounds like stimulating and intellectually interesting and fun and so forth. Here's what I don't get. Why don't you tweet more? And the reason I ask that is because I'm addicted to posting. And a lot of people in your shoes or at your level, they feel this impulse to always weigh in on everything. And Twitter is a great place to do it. I know, but never that much. And what I want to know is,
- [08:16]
Lloyd Blankfein
no, I was fighting with people. I was fighting with people that had subpoena power.
- [08:21]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Okay, so how do you resist the temptation to keep doing it? Because I would like to know how to post less. So how do you resist the urge to chime in on everything?
- [08:29]
Lloyd Blankfein
I was in the risk management business, and so the risk reward of certain things. So, for example, retired. When things are going badly, you can't leave my job. And by the way, we had the crisis of the century every four years, and most of the time they'd accuse us of. And probably you accused us of causing it falsely. Of course.
- [08:46]
Tracy Alloway
I did write a few of those.
- [08:47]
Lloyd Blankfein
Yes. I'm sure I pretend to have forgotten that. But when things are going well, when things are going badly, you can't leave. When things are going well, you don't want to leave. Which is why in my line of work, everybody leaves in distress. You get fired, something comes over, the world blows up. You don't do well. Something happens. And I didn't do that. I left on my own steam. Yeah. And I quit tweeting. I still tweet very occasionally, but I mostly quit tweeting before I got canceled, which is very unusual because most people quit after they've been Most people. Most people get quit. They don't quit on their own.
- [09:26]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
And you chalk that up to your natural risk management knowledge and intuitions. You're like, you know what? I'm just gonna. I'm not gonna do it until the end when you. You're not gonna go all the way.
- [09:37]
Lloyd Blankfein
Generally chalk it up to my normal anxiety and my not wanting to, you know, get killed. So cowardice, you might call, you know, just sensible. Well, sensibility. But really most of that stuff. And, you know, because I was doing things on the line, I would fight with, you know, Elizabeth Warren and, you know, largely because they would say something. Mostly I was responding and I kind of liked it. And the problem is you get a good reaction. Some, you know, good reaction. And then you start to feel clever. And when you start to feel clever, that's when you're gonna get killed. Because then you think, gee, this is irresistible. And then somebody might say, well, they're not gonna like that. And I said, how can I resist? It's so clever. And so guess what? I found it resistible. So I stopped.
- [10:21]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
It's impressive.
- [10:22]
Lloyd Blankfein
Yeah.
- [10:22]
Tracy Alloway
It just takes one bad tweet. That's right. So when I think about your career and, you know, I've read the whole book, so I know your career trajectory fairly well at this point, I kind of think of it as synonymous with globalization. And, you know, you rode the sort of wave of international expansion and then you retired in 2018, and it turned out 2018, 2020 was sort of the end of that globalization era.
- [10:47]
Lloyd Blankfein
Yeah. The world is a little less flat.
- [10:48]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah. When you look back on that time, do you think that was a blip? Was that an unusual circumstance? That's never going to be repeated.
- [10:57]
Lloyd Blankfein
When I started. You know, when sentiment changes, it changes your memory of what you used to think. It's kind of a weird thing. So nobody can remember being friends with Russia now, but we were. When I started, you couldn't think of going to Russia. I remember my early trips. I was in the commodities business also. I started in the commodities business. And we used to go to Russia in the early 80s, little like 1982, 1983, middle of the Cold War. And I remember when the plane would take off and you wouldn't go direct, you'd go to Switzerland. The plan would go in the air, people start applauding, and the plane lifted off. You couldn't imagine Russia being normal, like a place to do business. Then in the Go Go, years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, you'd go there and it was like the what? It was capitalism on steroids. And you thought that that was going to endure. And now it reverses again. Same thing with China. When we invested a lot of time, I personally invested a lot of time in left for the way. We still have a big business in China, but as you imagine, it's strained now. It's very hard to do business. We had a lot of joint ventures that can't be done because it's a Chinese, you know, too much of a Chinese association for it. But when I started, you couldn't have gone then for a long time you thought we were growing into each other. And then, you know, now we hit a speed bump. The point is there are cycles to everything. It's not a question of something being a blip. Everything is a blip and everything gets a little bit undone. I think I would have said. And I still believe, I think the tendency is for things to improve, to get better. You know what happened? Globalization. It's not just the rivalries of the polarization of the east and the West. The global financial crisis contributed to that. Because what happened was there was these central banks of the world and the governments of the world were coordinating their policies. And then when it hit the fan in a digital world where nothing really moves except electrons and digital notations, it suddenly became important to each government where an institution's assets were. If the assets were in the United, the US central bank, the Fed was lending money, for example, to the US affiliate of Deutsche bank, and they were lending to Deutsche bank multiples of the assets that Deutsche bank had subject to the US because most of their assets were Germany. All of a sudden people realized that and it became very 19th century. It became where are the assets? Like physically? As if they were really physical assets as opposed to. But assets have a location. And they discovered that similarly, I mean, you can go case data point by data point, Covid it made a real difference where they were manufacturing the vaccines for who got them first, or the PPE and all this other stuff. And so now, of course, that's been emphasized now because now it's America first. And I'm sure I don't speak German, but I'm sure in Germany it's Germany first and it's like that. But that also will evolve and that cycle will go again. Because does the world, it turns out when we started to globalize, you say, Does Europe need 14 battery makers? Shouldn't they just have three for the whole thing? And then it became very important that you had a battery maker if it's strategic in your own country and supply chains and other things that make people less global.
- [14:28]
Joe Weisenthal
Running a business means dealing with a lot of overly complicated Software. And most CRMs tend to follow the same pattern. They're packed with endless features. You'll never use, interfaces that feel clunky. And teams end up spending way too much time just trying to find basic information. Today's sponsor, pipedrive is a simple CRM tool designed for small and medium businesses. Pipedrive brings you entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear, complete view of sales processes and customer information. Designed to help teams stay in control and close more deals faster. It all centers around the visual sales pipeline, where you can see every deal, what stage it's in and what needs to happen next. Since everything is in one platform, pipedrive is designed to unite your team, keep track of sales tasks and stay on top of your leads. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipedrive right now. You'll get a 30 day free trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.comsimpleCRM to get started. That's pipedrive.comsimpleCRm so there's a lot of noise about AI.
- [15:30]
IBM Representative
But time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now a Global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions. Resolving 94% of common questions, not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off. Deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM.
- [15:58]
Cincinnati Insurance Representative
If you follow markets, you know the value of long term thinking. You plan, you diversify, you prepare for volatility. But even the best strategies can't prevent every bad day. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has helped individuals and businesses navigate tough moments. With expertise, personal attention and independent agents who focus on relationships, not transactions, the Cincinnati insurance companies let them make your bad day better. Find an agent at Cin Fin.
- [16:34]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
When you think about that time the Fed opening up swap lines with central banks all around the world. Banks getting support, even if they're not necessarily primarily domiciled in the U.S. do you think that that would even be possible today in the current media environment? Because it was controversial then, but not many people were aware of what was going on.
- [16:54]
Lloyd Blankfein
First of all, you have to do what you have to do. So would you think it would be possible to in an America first presidency where we're not going to go into wars. Is this possible? But of course he felt, obviously he felt there was some compulsion to do it. People would disagree, but that's certainly how he's representing it. So you do what you have to do. If we had a crisis like that, you would have to sort out the banking system. Now you can want to bring them up in trial and kill them, do whatever you want to it. But at the end of the day, governments don't lend money to people and central banks don't lend money to people. The transmission for economic policy and for monetary policy and getting money out into the public is the banking system. And if the banks are distressed, if you gave them money, they husband that money to increase their reserves so they could be solvent. And in fact they have to do that. The regulation requires that they do that. And so it's very, very hard to get money and resources and get people going and provide that stimulus to the general public with a distressed banking system. Which is why the big recession was a big recession because it was very hard to get over. Today if we had bad employment, if growth went down and we weren't particularly worried about inflation, it'd be no problem to stimulate the economy. You take rates down, fiscal spending. The banks are in good shape. If the banks are in bad shape, that's very hard to do.
- [18:23]
Tracy Alloway
I mean, since we're talking sort of hypothetical crisis scenarios, one of the things we sometimes hear from people is because the US government is very polarized at the moment, maybe some people would say feels a little bit disorganized at times. If we had a financial crisis, the response would be a lot less direct or a lot less swift than what we saw in 2008 when we had ex Goldmanites like Hank Paulson at the helm or Geithner for that matter. What's your sense of how the current administration would react to something like that?
- [18:57]
Lloyd Blankfein
Look, I said this and you know, you don't, you don't know, nobody knows anything. But my guess is they would be fleet of foot and they would do because you have to do what you have to do. They would hate, look, they would hate. If that had to happen, hypothetically, they would hate it. They hated it in 2008. Really hated it. Really, really. 15 more reallys hated it. But we were staring at, not so much staring at the abyss like it would have gone. But my guess, and everyone's always asked it, I think there was like a 15 to 20% chance that it could have really have gone off the rails and that we really would have had a crisis that would have taken a very long time. Because what happens is in a kind of crisis where there's credit, a credit crisis, which is what it was, a credit crisis, we owe each other money. There's a daisy chain of money. You bought something from him, he bought it from me. And that goes around in a credit where you don't know the solvency of your counterpart. You're not going to pay me until I pay you. So you're waiting, but I can't pay him unless I get my money from you. So I'm stuck and he's stuck and he's stuck and he's stuck. So the system is frozen. You need somebody with a big balance sheet and it's usually a government to say, we will, for the short term cover it. So all of you will get paid now go. And generally you don't have to use the money, the money comes back because it's just insecurity that drives that. And I think the government would have to do that, they'd hate it, but would have to do that. And by the way, is that going to happen again? You know, fortunately, you know, it was once an 80 year storm, but you know, I'm not, I don't think I'm going to see the next one. But you know these things. When you get through a crisis like that, everyone says, let's ensure we never have another crisis again. And you know how you can do that? You can turn yourself into a Treasury bill. You can turn your, and even a Treasury bill has risk because you're taking a risk that the value of the dollar doesn't get inflated away and it retains its purchasing power. If you take zero out risk, you will have zero progress and zero growth. And so what happens is, and again, it's a cycle to things. You come out of that and you say never, never, never, never. You implement very, very tough protocols and regulations and things. And over time you start to think, you know, it would be a lot growthier if there was more.
- [21:26]
Tracy Alloway
Growthier is a good word.
- [21:27]
Lloyd Blankfein
It'd be a lot growthier or wouldn't it be great if banks did mortgages again? Or wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to put down 30% to get them more and blah, blah, blah. And it relaxes that time. Memories start to dim and it gets to a point and maybe it gets past the point where it should and the cycle resumes and you say, how could that have happened again so soon. It's only been 80 years.
- [21:49]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
So one area, and you've commented on this a little bit in your little media tour over the last several days, but you know, we've had a lot of stress in private assets, private credit in particular. Some of the big companies having issue, all kinds of issues. It's one thing for it to be bad and maybe it's one thing for people to lose money. Is there anything about the structure though, that could get systemic, where it becomes something beyond just investors lost money because they made bad money.
- [22:18]
Lloyd Blankfein
I think talking about credit, I think the general issue is illiquid stuff. It could be private equity and everything else that balloons into a crisis. Of course, I don't think it's going to be systemic. No one does. Because if everyone thought it would be systemic, we would have fixed it or we would have done something about it before it got to that point. You're always surprised. Even the people who you think are in the inside who should know better, they're also surprised too. I don't know. The private credit and other private assets, I think they're generally, of course, by definition, they don't trade publicly, so. So they're less liquid and maybe sometimes illiquid and consequently very hard to price. So when you have your asset and you look at your account and you own this and you get a mark to market, is it reliable? Is it where you can sell it? There are a lot of private assets on people's balance sheets that take private equity. We've just gone through a period of time where we've had record equity prices in a world that's awash with liquidity, the best financing market, and there's still an accumulation of assets on the balance sheet of companies that are in the business of selling the assets they invest in. Yet it hasn't happened. So maybe they're not marked for sale really to be done. So that could be an issue. In general, I'd say one of the things now, there's nothing wrong with private credit, private asset, private equity, as long as the returns, the expected returns compensate you for the illiquidity and the people you're communicating to understand the illiquidity and the consequence of the illiquidity to them. That has to be made clear. I'm not always sure that it is and certainly if it goes wrong, no one will remember having been told that. So I would say, and taking account of that, I would say a particular private asset, whether it's credit or private equity, is no different in your hand, in an individual's hands or an institution hands. But the consequence of it going badly is much worse if it's individual hands. Why is that? Because I would say the official sector can watch institutions very high net worth individuals lose money and not be particularly perturbed about that. But when it goes to consumers and retails, other names for which are citizens and taxpayers and voters. Yeah, the public, the official sector gets very perturbed. So one of the comments I made is without opining whether these are good or whether the marks are correct or whether the illiquidity premium you're getting is adequate or not, I just said, you know, be careful. Some of these firms, people who run these firms have fabulous lives, do very well for a long time, have boats and everything and great and multiple houses. Have some trepidation about extending your business from institutions into 401ks people ETS people who are less than the highest net worth individuals and by the way adjacent insurance companies which is sort of one order away from individuals because insurance companies ensure real people and need to be solvent. So that's something that I'd say is happening too. It's not just the nature of the assets but where some of these assets are being put now.
- [25:32]
Tracy Alloway
So I take the point about retail investors and private credit but just putting your old Goldman Sachs CEO hat on again. I mean one of the things Goldman was famous for was its very dynamic risk management at the time. And so I'm very curious. Walk us through in excruciating detail how you as CEO of Goldman Sachs would be managing private credit risk at the moment on a day to day basis for something that you know, might be
- [25:57]
Lloyd Blankfein
mark to market quarterly risk that we had. Well, just hypothetically balance sheet. Yeah.
- [26:02]
Tracy Alloway
Like what would Goldman's style risk management? We have a lot of private credit.
- [26:05]
Lloyd Blankfein
I mean in the financial crisis everyone's focused on mortgages. Some of the biggest risks that we had were just loan commitments to. We have a very big, we're the biggest M and A house. So we have very big M and A franchise which means that if you do an M and A deal you commit to the financing. So we had a lot of financing commitments outstanding that was sort of eye opening at the time because we had commitments to make loans which believe me at the time when things are going crazy, it's the last thing you want to do is is due then. So we had to manage those risks. So what do we do? We make sure in the lead up to the press once something is happening, it's pretty late to start doing stuff when everybody's trying to get out of the same stuff. We sort of always knew we had a real abiding respect for reality. So we would always try to mark stuff to market. And very essentially we had a separate half. The firm would take risk and the other half would do the marks. And sometimes the risk takers would disagree and say, oh, that mark is too conservative. I think this asset's worth more. And we'd say, fine, I'm sure you're right. Go sell something and prove that your mark is better than their mark, that it's worth more. We would do that religiously. I mean, we were firm on that. And then when things started to get bad, when people couldn't sell things for where they thought it was, we started marking it lower. And when that started to happen, we didn't necessarily think. We didn't have a view what was going to happen. We went into risk management mode. So it didn't matter whether it was bullish or bearish. Stuff is happening. And so we just put out the word stay close to home. So we have to take risk. People come to us to buy from them what they want to sell, to sell to them what they want to buy. We get caught in risk taking situations from our general activities for our clients. But whenever we were veering too much in one direction, getting too long and getting too short, we would stop until there was another side to it and we would source the other side. So I mean, the key for us was not reacting crazily when it started to go badly, but what we did in the lead up. The other thing we did when we couldn't get other sides to things, we bought insurance in the market, famously, famously from other banks for very little, because it was worth very little. We bought insurance on AAA companies that turned out not to be aaa. We didn't do that because they thought that, aha, these really aren't AAA companies. Oh no, we thought they were AAA companies, but we just didn't want to have too much exposure to anything at that point. And the good thing about the fact that it doesn't look like you need the insurance is that the people who sell you the insurance don't charge you very much because they think it's free money. And by the way, we thought we were wasting money and it turned out not. But that's just a discipline that you have to have all the time. You can't have that discipline when it looks like things are going bad. You have to have that discipline when Things are looking good, Right?
- [29:05]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
That makes a lot of sense. New York City, how are you feeling? Is New York City the center of the finance world today? The same way it was 15, 30 years ago? And is that at risk?
- [29:16]
Lloyd Blankfein
Look, New York City is still where people come. Young people come especially to learn from their colleagues and to get around and be surrounded by a good culture and a good place. And I think that's why I love the book. And I thought it was a brilliant book, but I thought it was wrong. The world is flat. You can be stimulated by something that's not right. The fact of the matter is you could be hooked up and be living in Warsaw, which, by the way, is a financial community. And there's a lot of tech people in Warsaw. But people who are smart and ambitious want to be around other people who are smart and ambitious.
- [29:49]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Has that changed at all?
- [29:51]
Lloyd Blankfein
I'd say there are more pods than there were before. So I think there's communities. Obviously in San Francisco, which is a tech community, a subtech community is Boston, which has biotech. And so there are other places that grow, but I still think the highest concentration is still New York. People are promoting Miami for that. And there's a lot of reasons for it. Like you get to keep more of your money because there's no state tax. Expensive place to live. New York, by the way, very expensive place to die. I don't know why I'm thinking those dark thoughts now, but because New York has an estate tax and even California doesn't. But so for tax reasons and for reasons of sunshine, people are going there, but it's not New York. It's still New York, you know, kind of. Sorry.
- [30:37]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
You know, on the Miami thing, I like Miami, but why aren't you there? You don't spend 183 days of the year.
- [30:45]
Lloyd Blankfein
I'm still for tax purposes, taxpayer.
- [30:48]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Yeah. Why?
- [30:49]
Lloyd Blankfein
Stupid. Okay. No, I do it because New York
- [30:53]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
City is the greatest right I have.
- [30:55]
Lloyd Blankfein
You know, my wife, you know, we have kids and we have grandkids. I tell my wife from time to time, if you really loved your kids and your grandkids, you'd move to Florida. And when I just said no. But we like being around a family. We have plenty of money. My wife, I don't know how things run in your household, but I would say that she has full voting control.
- [31:20]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Understood.
- [31:20]
Tracy Alloway
I'm not gonna say anything. I'm holding back comment right now. So I just want to go back to risks for a second. So, you know, in your book, you talk a Little bit about private credit. But the one risk you highlight as the sort of big one that worries you the most is some sort of technological risk. Like oh no.
- [31:36]
Lloyd Blankfein
I said, yeah, you know, has said the world is going to end in a whimper, not a bang. You know, everybody's talking about malevolent state agents, you know, taking it down every time we lost stuff and we had some wonderful problems in technology along the. Every once in a while there was some bad behavior and somebody hid something for a while. But most of the time it was a fat finger. Like I remember one famous incident where somebody now why anybody would do this? But they were testing some software and in the software they were, you know, it just said, I remember this, like somehow they were selling. Somehow it got turned on and it sold all stocks that started with an L, M, N, O or P for a dollar. Now if you were going to test something, why wouldn't you sell, sell it for a million dollars so nothing ever gets done. But they had sell it for a dollar and that thing was working for about 15 seconds and did about $2 billion, you know, a billion dollars and a half dollars worth of transactions which we managed to get undone mostly. Yes, you know, fat finger. What's a fat finger? That's when you hit the wrong key and somebody, it was like stupid. Somebody put in and do it. The problem with technology is you want to check things over and over again. But if you build in nine checks, nobody takes it seriously because they know eight other people are going to check it. It doesn't even solve the problem to build in more layers of checking because it's mind numbing to check something where there's not a problem except once every two years. Who's going to sleep through that? No, I said the world is getting dangerous in a way. When I started out in a trading room, everyone was said out loud. Somebody would say bye and people. And it was all noise. Today you go into a trading room and you're communicating digitally with the person sitting next to you. In the old days you'd shout across the room and if somebody said something wrong, a buy instead of a sell or the wrong number or the wrong price, the whole room would stop and everybody would look at that person. You would hear it. Now nobody hears anything and if they did, they wouldn't know because no one could intuit anything because a lot of algorithms and a lot of technology trading. So I would say with technology, technology is leverage. And leverage is good when it's going the right way and leverage is bad when it's going the wrong way. And by the way, that's in life and you know, if you had an industrial, you know, prior to the age we're in today, where, you know, where the nuclear age, where we're proliferating in more atomic power and things like that, even for good uses, what could an industrial accident be? They think the biggest industrial accident was Bhopal, Union Carbide. 8,000 or 9,000, very tragic, horrible situation. Liability for Union Carbide destroyed the company. But I think 8,000 or 9,000 people died in Fukushima, the Japanese, when they had the tsunami and infected plane. If the wind had been going in a different direction, you would have had millions of people die. That's technology in progress for you. So not only is there leverage, the ability to intuit and see what the problem is, is less so. I just postulated that we have all these safeguards, all these things, all these state actors malevolently trying to cause problems. Yes. But you know something? I'm also worried about the mistake, the fat finger, the unintentional thing, because how do you build it? It's hard to build in safeguards because the more safeguards you build, the more repose and relaxed you get about each one of them. And nobody finds out that no one's doing that. No one's doing their job.
- [35:19]
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Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Yep.
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Public Investing Representative
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- [37:49]
Tracy Alloway
seems inevitable to me now that AI is going to become more and more of banks, risk management or back office systems. Like what parts of a bank would you feel comfortable outsourcing to everything shy
- [38:02]
Lloyd Blankfein
of the job I had.
- [38:03]
Tracy Alloway
Okay, go on.
- [38:05]
Lloyd Blankfein
You know, we don't know. I mean the greatest technologists today aren't sure themselves where it'll go. But you're going to look, if you think about it, our brains, we're just wiring, we're just code. We're a lot, a lot of lines of code, but we're just code. And at some point you cross into judgment and reasoning and I'm sure it'll happen. I'm sure it's a lot. I'm sure the people who at least until they start to walk better than they walk today, the people who garden for me and the massage therapists and the personal trainers are safe. Well, maybe not even personal trainers, but everything shy of that is just some, you know, and then we're going to just have to. And then there'll be more jobs that leverage whatever stage of progress we're at. You know, once upon a time, not that long ago, beginning of the 20th century, more than half the country was involved in agriculture. Guess what? We absorb those people. But it's not without stresses and strains. Not everybody who's not everybody who's a software programmer is going to be a Pilates teacher. And so there'll be some stress and dislocation. But who knows the way society is going to evolve, maybe you know, remember, you know, from school you read the Marxist idea where everybody's going to only have to work four days a week. Marxist ideology. And who knows, maybe there'll be. Once upon a time there was a six day work week. Even on Wall street people came in Saturday, that's when they did all the back office stuff. And maybe we go to a three day work week. Maybe we work. Once upon a time it was a 10 hour workday. Now it's an eight hour workday, maybe it goes to five. Maybe everybody just works less and moans to high heaven that they have to work four hours that day. So by the way, it doesn't matter whether we like it or not, it's going to happen. So you could spend a lot of time mourning for it and regretting it, but it's going to happen. But the idea that machines are going to do a lot of stuff that we do. When I started, when I started on Wall street, you know, the tape, people don't know ticker tape. What is that? Ticker tape? Those were the threads that came out. Well, once upon a time that's how you communicated, you communicated tickers and you couldn't get it back so you had to proofread it very carefully and you had to make sure that the confirmation you were sending to the Central bank of China, Beijing didn't go to the Central bank of China, Taiwan, and you kill yourself. So I spent three hours a day doing that. Nobody spends any time doing that. When I practice law. You used to have to go and look at every case that ever mentioned a case you relied on lest it be have been overruled or criticized. I spent days doing that. No one spends minutes doing that today. That's progress. It's going to happen and I welcome it. Particularly since I've already made my money and I'm unemployed.
- [40:47]
Tracy Alloway
Must be nice, Joe. When I first joined Bloomberg, one of my key duties was to monitor the fax machine just in case the bank of Japan sent a fax over.
- [40:56]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Do they still, do they communicate with.
- [40:58]
Tracy Alloway
I believe it's been automated.
- [40:59]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Now one of the versions of the future that people talk about is that okay, AI is going to come, a bunch of white collar jobs are going to be eliminated and there's going to be some sort of like universal basic income redistribution so that people can survive. But in theory, like that would require some taxation. And the future, the handful of winners of the AI world, like they'd have to find some way to tax their wealth perhaps. But this gets, I'm really Interested in taxation because, like, I pay a good chunk of my salary disappears in taxes. We had a good year last year, so we got bonuses. Recently, a good chunk immediately disappeared. I'm not going to like.
- [41:38]
Lloyd Blankfein
So now you're not a Social Democrat anymore?
- [41:40]
Tracy Alloway
No, no.
- [41:40]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
I'm just like, not the end of the world. I don't love it, but it's not the end of the world. It's hard for me to wrap my head around people who have all the money in the world and still optimize their lives about going to the lowest marginal tax jurisdiction.
- [41:54]
Tracy Alloway
Can you help?
- [41:54]
Lloyd Blankfein
No, it's crazy.
- [41:55]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
You haven't done that?
- [41:56]
Lloyd Blankfein
No, I haven't done that.
- [41:56]
Joe Weisenthal
But you're still in New York.
- [41:57]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
But can you help me wrap?
- [41:58]
Lloyd Blankfein
But I'll just say that's why they have a lot of money to begin with, because that's how they. Because that's how they think. And also they're competitive, fiercely competitive, and they just want to win. I mean, actually, it's good in a way. I'm glad that the Mark Zuckerbergs, you may like or dislike these names of people, but the fact is. Or Elon Musk, they're on the cutting edge and they're still motivated to work, thank goodness. I'm glad they're ours. I'm glad they work. But to just extrapolate the point you're making, an economic system has to do a couple of things. I mean, it has to do a lot of things, but two major things. It has to create wealth and then it has to allocate that wealth, thus created according to the values of society. I think our system has done a pretty good job in creating wealth. Nobody can get out there and figure out what the new thing is. And nobody's more ruthless about taking things that fail, getting rid of them and repurposing them and getting them off the balance sheet and building, plowing over that airport that no one lands at and making it turn it into a Walmart. Nobody's better at doing that. But where we have done poorly is the allocation of it, the allocation of the proceeds. And that's of course, where a lot of the polarization that we're living through now and a variety of things you have to. Obviously progressive taxation is one of them. Just building the safety net so things are free and available to everything that previously you would have had to pay for. Public housing has air conditioning. Now, public housing, when I grew up didn't have air conditioning. So making life better at a base minimum. But that's the task. And that's the challenge that we have to do, to allocate based upon values in a way that doesn't disincentivize people from working. So at some level of taxation, you may be disincentivized from working. Poor Elon Musk went back to his shareholders and said, I'm only worth $500 billion because you took away my options from the Tesla thing. Give them back or else I'm not going to work for Tesla anymore. So there. And so he got it back. And so now he's got that extra stimulus of billions, 501 to 749. So people do what they do. But by the way, I'm glad he's working and I'm glad he's one of mine. And I still can't believe those rocket ships can land in tandem.
- [44:17]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
That's incredible.
- [44:18]
Lloyd Blankfein
So beautifully. And nobody else seems to be able to do it. So bravo. Keep on going. I'll give you an extra couple of dollars if it'll help you.
- [44:25]
Tracy Alloway
We started this conversation talking about how your career trajectory kind of mirrored the rise of globalization. But the other thing it mirrored was the rise of trading and fic on Wall Street. I'm curious if you have any sense nowadays what the next sort of booming business is going to be among the investment banks. Because everything kind of feels the same. Everything kind of feels flat, like, is there something that's going to take off where you can differentiate yourself?
- [44:50]
Lloyd Blankfein
It's not the same, but it rhymes. You know, it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. You know, really, the last generation, the, you know, the cool kids in town were, you know, private equity and alternatives feels a little less cool. The last couple of days it shifts, but we're always wringing out efficiencies for things and we're always figuring out risk versus reward. And so illiquid stuff look better than public market stuff. Then you have a liquidity event where people try to sell and they get gated and that's not working out so well. And so that goes. I don't know. I think one of the things that AI can't really do is they can't take risk. They could tell you, in my opinion, based upon my working this algorithm against this huge database, how those dice would have rolled and what percentages when you will do these simulations and stuff. But at the end of the day, you have to still apply judgment. If we were sitting there having a conversation 100 years ago, by the way, people 100 years from now are going to be around I don't know if they'll be sitting on this chair or floating above ground, but they're gonna be talking about how primitive we were, thinking that we're, you know, we're thinking, sitting here thinking how cool we are today and how everything's up to date in Kansas City and everything is good and novel. But all this is gonna look stupid. Could you imagine they carry their cell phones? Ha, ha, ha ha. Could you imagine? Yeah, I mean. But some things, as general principles are gonna persist. I think they'll be create. You know, people are gonna still write music and natural, you know, people will fill in the gaps. If you plug in a song, it'll publish another song like that. But will it do something radically innovative? I don't know. It's possible. Again, brains are lines of code. Maybe they'll just have more lines of code and eventually do it. But I do think certain things, like willingness to take risk, judgment. I've known so many brilliant people, and I've known so many people with good judgment. It's amazing how infrequently those come together at the same person at the same
- [46:56]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
time within a given bank. The push, pull, or the tug between, okay, now banking and deal making is hot or trading is hot, and it seems to go back and forth. Is there a direction at Goldman or any other bank where the next leader is going to come from? Could it come from the technology side of the bank?
- [47:15]
Lloyd Blankfein
Yes. Well, first of all, it already has. In a firm like Goldman, I bet over a third of the population of the firm are engineers. It was when I was there. It wouldn't have gotten less in this period of time. If anything, it would have gone more in that direction. So it already is engineering efficiency. Look, we're in a world now where in trading and market making, a lot of which is done algorithmically by machines. It's a millisecond game. If you have your computers a half a block closer to the main computers of the platform, you win everything. Because even moving at the speed of light, getting there ahead. So that's already been done. But in a firm, maybe. I'm interpreting your question a little bit differently. These things happen at different times. So sometimes it's the people who put deals together, sometimes it's the people who finance deals. Sometimes the biggest, coolest kids on the block are the risk managers who prevent the firm from discombobulation and manage risk so successfully so the other people can do their jobs in our organization. One of the things that I think has helped Goldman Sachs through the Agent is that we still. The firm is still run like a 26 years since it was a private partnership. Half of my tenure was in a private partnership, half was in a company. But we ran the firm as a partnership. Everybody in the firm got paid largely on based on how the firm as a whole did, not just their narrow area. People who did a good job and it wasn't their turn or the market was working a way that they couldn't make money, got compensated well for doing a good job, even if the opportunity wasn't there. And if it was an easy market to make money in and they weren't doing a good job and didn't do well, didn't matter that they did well, you know, in other words, we looked at the firm as a whole. People had to look out for each other. The place was run as a partnership. That's very helpful if you have a firm full of people who are owners. Everyone is looking around what the people next to them are doing. And if they see bad behavior or something's not right, they demand information about the whole firm, not just their narrow area. And they give you opinions even when you don't want to hear it. And guess what? It's a little bit slower and harder to run that organization. But I think you get a better
- [49:38]
Tracy Alloway
outcome now that the book is officially published. It's been a whole 18 hours, I suppose, since it's been published, but is there anything with the benefit of that 18 hours of daylight and reminiscence that you wish you had included in the book and that you left out?
- [49:56]
Lloyd Blankfein
I want.
- [49:56]
Tracy Alloway
The really good people were always telling
- [49:58]
Lloyd Blankfein
me, I told, you know, we had, you know, Bloomberg was very nice enough. Bloomberg the man, not necessarily the company hosted an event last night, and I thought of a Bloomberg. There was a story that I told that at the end of it, I could tell you the story, but please. Okay. A million years ago, when the first Bloomberg terminals came out and I was a fairly junior person, and they put a Bloomberg terminal in front of me that about 900 people were supposed to share, but it was right in front of me, and everybody was walking by it like they were walking. Remember the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey? Remember the Obelisk?
- [50:32]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Obelisk.
- [50:33]
Lloyd Blankfein
The obelisk. And everyone's doing this. Everybody was doing that. And I finally figured out how to use it. I put yellow pastins on it with my schedule and numbers that I had to look out for. In other words, I couldn't turn. I didn't know how to turn on the machine, but I was using it as a bulletin board. And then somebody calls up and said, lloyd, phone line. So and so who is it? Bloomberg? So I said, I'll call him back. He said, no, no, it's Bloomberg the person, not Bloomberg the company. And it was Michael Bloomberg. And he calls me and he called up and I get on the phone and he said, we noticed you haven't turned on your machine. And I said, oh, my God, where's the camera?
- [51:11]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
I said, well, we could tell digital surveillance very well.
- [51:14]
Lloyd Blankfein
Yeah, we turned it. And I said, and I said, well, and so you're calling me. And he goes, oh, no, we do the way here. And I don't know if they do it today, but in early Bloomberg, he had all the senior people in the organization. Every day they had to call five customers each one and call them and discuss. And I said, wow, I promise I'll turn on machine. Probably about two years later I figured out how to do it, but I'll turn on the machine. But I said, isn't that a very inefficient use of your time? Because here you are calling me. And I wasn't a senior interacting guys. And he goes, no, no, we learn a lot about the business. I realize now that was a very stupid comment because here I am. First of all, everybody on our floor knew that Mike had called and that he cared. The guy whose name was on the door cared about whether we were using it or not. And not only laterally across that dimension, everybody knew. But here I am 35 years later telling the story. And so now you're hearing about it. That was a very good use of three minutes of Michael Bloomberg that I'm telling that story about his care. And so to me, I know how Bloomberg got built. And so that was the lesson I learned. So I told that story. And then I said, you know, Mike, this book is so good and has so many good stories that that one didn't even make it in the book. It's on the cutting room floor. If it sells well, maybe volume two or volume three.
- [52:38]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Well, we went a couple minutes over, but that was. It was a good story.
- [52:42]
Tracy Alloway
That was a good ad for both the book and for Bloomberg. So thank you.
- [52:46]
Lloyd Blankfein
I know my audience.
- [52:47]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
Lloyd Blankfein, thank you so much. Thank you very much.
- [53:04]
Tracy Alloway
That was our conversation with former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, recorded live on March 3rd 3rd at Bloomberg Invest. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway.
- [53:15]
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow Lloyd Blankfein he's at Lloyd Blankfein. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand Dashiell Bennett at dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks and for more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.comoddlots for the daily newsletter and all of our
- [53:31]
Interviewer (Odd Lots Producer or Co-host)
episodes and you can chat about all these topics 24.
- [53:33]
Joe Weisenthal
7 in our Discord, Discord GG and
- [53:37]
Tracy Alloway
if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we ask Lloyd Blankfein why he doesn't tweet more, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
- [54:01]
Lloyd Blankfein
SA.
- [54:28]
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