Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein describes structuring a novel S&P 500 forward trade for Middle Eastern institutional investors early in his Wall Street career.
Opinion
Blankfein: Automated trading software introduces unprecedented scale for multi-billion dollar losses
“Before this technological age, not just AI, but in general, could you have had a mistake that could cost billions of dollars? Not really, but now you can leave a piece of software, could go out and do 70,000 transactions. The leverage in these things is themse…”
Insight
Blankfein: Managing risk mostly means persuading hesitant employees to take more risk
“But, you know, we have a lot of risk takers. And I would say that the biggest challenge for management is the risk management side, which is really getting people to refrain from risk. Which is about a third of the time when you're in that business, and by the…”
Assertion Supported
Blankfein: Robinhood incorrectly claimed to offer government-insured accounts early on
“I looked at, you know, Robin Hood, great company. But early on, you know, they declared a kind of they declared that they had government-insured accounts that weren't government-insured. They had some slip-ups and a lot of apologies get made. You could do that…”
Assertion Supported
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs fully hedged its 2008 AIG exposure with collateral agreements
“We were fully hedged because we had bought credit protection. Right. But we also had a collab. So we go, we, a single A credit, got a collateral agreement with AIG AAA.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Blankfein: The large language model market will eventually consolidate to two winners
“The world may not need 10 large language models. Maybe it needs four will be winners, and two will be very big winners, and the other two will get by, and maybe it'll get reduced over time to two.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Blankfein: AI automation will not create permanent mass labor displacement
“Turn back the clock at the beginning of the 20th century. More than half the country was in agriculture. Guess what? A single digit percentage is today. People found stuff to do. We'll find stuff to do.”