In private talks with another blogger, I had assumed that Goldman Sachs and other financial executives were relatively clueless, because it would be hard for anyone with an understanding of the statistics they were using to put that much faith in them.

Apparently not…

The description of GS’s corporate culture didn’t paint a picture of corruption so much as of an extreme lack of hierarchy and constant communication between people of all levels. A person who’s used to that is going to have trouble getting anything done in another organization, no matter how high his new rank is or how pure his intentions are.

If that’s true, then Paulson’s and Corzine’s travails might be good news for the company itself–an incentive to keep the company’s best people in-house!

Certainly. We make real progress once they are behind bars, bankrupt, or executed for Treason. [1]

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2009/11/19/our-future-outsourced-by-the-oligarchs.html

Now that I think about it, I wonder if any GS alumni have ever tried starting their own non-financial organizations? It’s probably easier to plant at the beginning than to transplant it into an established setup, be it a bank or a Government high office.