Why I Left Goldman Sachs A Wall Street Story

On March 14, 2012 more than 3 million people read Greg Smith's Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled "Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs." It drew passionate responses from former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, legendary CEO Jack Welch, and New York City's Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Smith now picks up where that Op-Ed left off and uses his twelve years at the firm to shine a bright light on Wall Street's callous "take-the-money-and-run" mentality that brought the world economy to its knees a few short years ago. His story begins in the summer of 2000, when a 21-year-old Smith arrives as a summer intern at Goldman Sachs and memorizes Business Principle #1: Our Clients' Interests Always Come First. This becomes his mantra as he spends the next twelve years rising from intern to analyst to sales-trader with clients who controlled assets of more than a trillion dollars. Smith takes readers along as he learns the ropes (and experiences the shenanigans) of the trading floor. He takes a dive in a table tennis tournament to keep a client happy and attends a Las Vegas bachelor party at the height of the real estate boom. He also watches how the firm heroically responds to 9-11 and recounts the day Warren Buffet arrived on the trading floor to bail the firm out during the 2008 market crash. Things change, and Smith describes in page-turning detail how the most storied investment bank on Wall Street went from taking iconic companies like Ford, Sears, and Microsoft public to a "vampire squid" that called its clients "muppets" and was forced to pay the government half a billion dollars to settle the largest civil fraud suit in history. His breaking point came when one of the bank's largest clients looked him in the eye and said, "The truth is we haven't trusted you guys for a long time . . . We do business with you because we have to." After conversations with nine Goldman Sachs partners over a twelve-month period proved fruitless, Smith believed that the only way the system would ever change was for an insider to finally speak out publicly. So he walked away from a multi-million dollar career to tell this story.

Greg Smith resigned in the spring of 2012 as the head of Goldman Sachs's United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, Smith graduated from Stanford University and went to work for the firm full-time in 2001. He spent his first ten years in the New York headquarters before moving to London in 2011. He currently lives in New York City.