Consider two institutions. One has a long and storied history, a critical player in global finance, its decisions and policies impacting its own economy and those of other countries. The other is the Bank of England – which has just hired Huw Pill, an alumnus of the first, Goldman Sachs.
Goldmanites of the financial kind – unlike the yellow-green vanadium analogue of andradite garnet that shares their name and which is found in just a handful of metamorphosed deposits around the word – seem to be everywhere.
It’s hardly surprising. Running the world after acting like you run the world (or is it the other way around?) seems like a natural story arc. There appear to be few places safe from the tentacles of an enterprising squid, particularly the vampire kind.
The corridors of US power, inevitably, have long echoed with the voices of Goldman. Hank Paulson, Robert Rubin and Steven Mnuchin were Treasury secretaries. Bill Dudley used to run the New York Fed. Gary Cohn was president Trump’s chief economic adviser for as long as he could stand it, which wasn’t long.
Further afield there have been the likes of Mario Draghi, Romano Prodi and Malcolm Turnbull.
But the Bank of England already has form too. Goldman alumnus Mark Carney was a former governor; former Goldmanite Ben Broadbent is deputy governor for monetary policy. At the BoE, Broadbent will even be Pill’s boss.
‘One Goldman Sachs’ is the slogan du jour within the firm, but it takes on a slightly different reading with every new appointment to a position of power outside the bank.
Walter Sachs once described the nineteenth-century promissory paper business set up by Marcus Goldman as “a small business done in a small way”. Relative to its giant commercial banking rivals, the same might be said of Goldman Sachs today.
But even its early pioneers recognised that influence is more powerful than balance sheet. Punching above your weight is much easier when you’re in charge of the scales.
