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Lloyd Craig Blankfein (born September 20, 1954) is the current Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. After the May 31, 2006, nomination of former CEO Hank Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury, Blankfein was announced as his replacement.

Life and career

Blankfein was born in to a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York City and raised in Brooklyn's Linden Houses, part of the New York City Housing Authority. His father was a clerk with the Postal Service in Manhattan.^[2] While in the projects of New York City Lloyd grew up with current songwriter Charles P. Hurowitz. He received primary and secondary education in the public schools of the New York City Department of Education, and was a valedictorian at Thomas Jefferson High School in 1971. He attended Harvard University, where he lived in Winthrop House, and earned his B.A in 1975, graduating with fellow Winthrop House student and future Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. In 1978, Blankfein received a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Blankfein worked as a corporate tax lawyer for the law firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. In 1981, he joined Goldman's commodities trading arm, J. Aron, as a precious metals salesman in their London office.

He is the Gala Chairman of the Rockefeller family's Asia Society in New York. He serves on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization seeking to alleviate poverty in New York, as well as on the Board of Overseers at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Blankfein earned a total of $53.4 million in 2006, making him one of the highest paid executives on Wall Street. His bonus allegedly reflected the performance of Goldman Sachs, which reported record net earnings of $9.5 billion. The compensation included a cash bonus of $27.3 million, with the rest paid in stock and options. While CEO of Goldman Sachs Group in 2007, Lloyd C. Blankfein earned a total compensation of $53,965,418, which included a base salary of $600,000, a cash bonus of $26,985,474, stocks granted of $15,542,756 and options granted of $10,453,031.^[3]

Blankfein has been named as the most outrageous CEO for the year 2009 by Forbes.^[4] Taking a different position, Financial Times named Blankfein as its 2009 Person of the Year stating, "his bank has stuck to its strengths, unashamedly taken advantage of the low interest rates and diminished competition resulting from the crisis to make big trading profits."^[5] However, there are critics of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street that take issue with those practices.^[6]

Politics

Blankfein contributed at least $7000 to Democratic Party candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008^{[citation needed]}.

On April 7, 2009, Blankfein recommended guidelines to overhaul executive compensation. According to the New York Times, Blankfein said that lessons from the global financial crisis included the need to "apply basic standards to how we compensate people in our industry".^[7]

In November, 2009, he declared in an interview that, as a banker, he was doing "God's work".^[8] Several days later, he indicated that he regretted that remark, which had been intended as a joke. He also apologized on behalf of Goldman Sachs to the public for unspecified "things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret" which contributed to the financial and economic crisis. The firm later announced its 10,000 Small Businesses initiative, which would commit $500 million to aid American small businesses.^[9]

References

External links

• The Man Goldman Is Banking On 2004 profile from BusinessWeek magazine
• Goldman Runs Risks, Reaps Rewards, The New York Times