The Blackberry Five safe and well, thanks to City Critters and the fats cats at Goldman Sachs

Because it's Sunday and  it's nice to post good news ocasionally,  I couldn't resist following up my earlier New York/Goldman Sachs kitten story,  with this great photo of the five abandoned kittens - who were finally rescued by the lovely people at City Critters, with a little help from their friends at Goldman Sachs, who paid for the little critters' medical checks and helped place them in good homes.

The kittens were rescued by http://www.citycritters.org/ - a small animal rescue group in New York, staffed with voluntary help by people who all have fulltime day jobs as well. They mainly work with the many cats living rough in the city -  and some dogs, too.

They're a great organisation, and do a lot of good.  If you're interested, live in New York, or just like cats, visit their website, where you can also make donations for the animals.

The charming photo is courtesy of someone - (sorry, don't have your name) - posting a comment and photo in Downtown Express, the newspaper who was covering the story.

I used to live in New York on the corner of Bleeker and have many happy memories of catching the No 10 bus almost outside the apartment, and heading up town for yet another wonderful New York kinda day.

EVEN GOLDMAN SACHS CAN GET IT WRONG

The downside of being rich and successful  is that you have to be ultra careful of your image.

There are certain  groups it's safest not to get involved with.    Animal lovers, for instance - and, particularly, cat lovers:  steer well away from anything to do with fluffy, pretty, helpless little kittens. Put one foot wrong, and these people will mark you out, tell all their pals, and start a campaign against you - modern technology makes it frighteningly easy to do.
(This great photo is thanks to flickr via Marissa Cap)

Goldman Sachs quite accidentally became  involved with a bunch of kittens. Seems their intentions were good - but  they took their eye off the catnip ball. And look what happened.

In New York, Rich Brotman  runs an animal rescue service called City Critters.

In August, he found a litter of five abandoned kittens on a construction site on which Goldman Sachs are building their new HQ.  The youngsters were nicknamed Blackberries because of their dark coats.

Rich Brotman took the baby moggies home and approached Goldman S about help for paying  the medical costs involved in making sure the animals were in good health. He also asked GS to canvas their employees, to see if anyone would like to adopt  the the little fellows.  Goldman Sachs were pleased to help.

However, it wasn't long before things were going rapidly downhill for the company.

In October a  local New York paper claimed that promised money for the veterinary bills had not been forthcoming - and, insult to injury, the kittens had been brutally abandoned as no-one had given them homes.

In no time at all, this story was all over the internet, the blogosphere was in uproar, and Goldman Sachs wereThe Great Satan and marked with the number of the Beast, 666.  None of it was helped by the fact the company  had just announced  $3.2billion quarterly profits. All that cash floating around - and  5 little kittens abandoned to their fate.  Oh, dear!

Except, it turned out it was all a big understanding,  as the Goldman Sachs boys belatedly leapt into action to point out. All the bills had been paid - the delay had not been on their side, they had been waiting to be billed by the vet.  And all the kittens had found good homes, two of them going to a friend of the Goldman Sachs lawyer. And, they added plaintively,  they would never be unkind to kittens.

Goldman S should learn from this.  Their public image is not good at the moment, and when that happens, people will pounce on anything that seems to confirm that.  It's obvious what happened here.  To GS it was a minor incident, they agreed to do something about the kittens, and they did.  Bills  take time to come in, and get processed by whatever the section of their accounts dept is that deals with homeless kittens. Their mistake was in not keeping in touch and explaining things.

It could have been such a great tale to improve their image.  They messed up.  Maybe they should realise that a good PR department is worth just as much as their uber-clever money men. A shake up of their PR people, perhaps?

Goldman Sachs and The Dumb God

I quote below two excerpts I rather liked from John Arlidge's long interview in the Sunday Times on 8 November with the Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein.

But before that, in view of the publicity that has been given to a careless passing reference to God towards the end of the interview, (and which has occasioned a number of lunatic fringe contributions in the comments column) , I thought I'd start with one of my own favourites quotes. It comes from Ben Johnson's comedy,  Volpone.  Here is Volpone, the old fox himself , speaking as he gazes lovingly on his gold:

"Riches, the dumb god, that givest all men tongues,

That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things;

The price of soul; even hell, with thee to boot,

Is made worth heaven"

First said in 1606, Johnson's words are as accurate today as they were then. Money still enables you to do all things . . .

So here are two short excerpts from John Arlidge's interview with Lloyd Blankfein. 

Blankfein, acknowledging the public dislike of the banks these days, says:

"I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer."  But then, he slowly begins to argue the case for modern banking. "We’re very important," he says, abandoning self-flagellation. "We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle." To drive home his point, he makes a remarkably bold claim. "We have a social purpose."

Later, Arlidge discusses why Goldman Sachs came out of the sub prime mortgage debacle better than other banks.  He points up the fanatical attention to detail that characterises the company, and explains:

"Take the sub-prime mortgage sector, the ticking toxic debt bomb that detonated the economic crisis. One year before bad home loans brought down Lehman and Bear Stearns, forced shotgun marriages of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America and HBOS to Lloyds, and made Royal Bank of Scotland a national joke, Goldman’s daily valuations revealed it had suffered modest losses in its mortgage holdings for just over a week. At most banks, the losses might have gone unnoticed or been dismissed as a rounding error, but Goldman convened a meeting of senior bankers to try to find out what was going on. Even though the housing and mortgage markets were still buoyant, the bank did not like what it saw and began reducing its exposure. When the credit crunch hit, its losses in the mortgage sector were only $1.7 billion, lower than any other big investment bank. UBS lost $58 billion."

Note the final sentence. How are the mighty fallen?  $58 billion down the drain - God in Heaven, what were UBS doing?  Whatever possessed them to get into such murky waters when their whole raison d'etre is asset and wealth management

As for the apparent quote from Blankfein, 'I'm just a banker doing God's work,"  -  for goodness sake lighten up, you people, it was a joke!

The richest man in the world - or not, as the case may be

In 2008 Forbes placed Warren Buffett as the richest man in the world.  Current opinion appears to place Bill Gates in that position, with Buffett coming in second.

Buffett, now in  his late seventies, has just given 37 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation.

As he is currently in the news because of the very good recent interview with Evan Davis, I thought I'd give him a brief mention.  Brief, because it's very rare for me to find a man of great wealth as excruciatingly boring as I find Buffett.  He's a rich version of a dull man from the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska, who appears to have been driven from his early youth to acquire huge sums of money, without seeming to know what to do with it when he got it. And when he gives it away, as my second para shows, he doesn't give it to a personal cause of his own, but to other people who do know what to do with it.  For some reason, he seems to be regarded as a bit of a saint.

Buffett's profession is investments,  that's all he does; he does it brilliantly, but it's all he does. He doesn't make, produce or create anything, except money.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, changed the world. That's why his photo is up here and not Buffett's.

(This great shot of Gates, all youth and geekiness, is from the seattleworld blog site.)

There's a good piece by Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph about the Davis/Buffett interview. As Warner points out,  Buffett says he doesn't like the greed fuelled ways of Wall Street, but, as a little research shows,  he still invests in the Wall Street big beasts such as Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs.  Buffett says he thinks derivatives are  'financial weapons of mass destruction", yet it's clear that over the past year he has in bought extensively in these markets.

Buffett very nearly run into trouble with the regulators over sharp practices in his insurance subsiduary General Re, wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett's holding company.  One unnamed associate said that "with a history as complex as Buffett's, there's bound to be an indictment in there somewhere".

In the Evans interview, Buffett reprised his often expressed view that the rich should pay higher taxes and not grumble about it.  He doesn't seem to acknowledge that the basic objection, of rich and poor alike, is not to the concept of taxes - most people agree on the need to fund things like the health services, education etc. - but to having large chunks of their hard earned money taken off them by incompetent politicians who've never worked in a real job in their lives, and have no idea of how to handle the money efficiently when they get it.

Buffett also believes in not leaving money to his three children. That about sums up Warren Buffett to me.  The man from Omaha is just not my kind of rich man.

Next post will be about two rather different rich men. They're not currently in the news, but I'm going to do a piece on them anyway - because I'm really rather taken with them.