Finance

Goldman Sachs Follows Jamie Lannister Character Arc (Hopefully To A More Satisfying Conclusion)

Is this old repository for rich white guys maybe, just maybe, turning over a new leaf?

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Goldman Sachs. It’s the wildly profitable investment bank and financial services company that everyone loves to hate. It’s an institution. An archetype. But is this old repository for rich white guys maybe, just maybe, turning over a new leaf?

It’s a story we’re familiar with, one which will contain many Game of Thrones spoilers (stay, and waive your right to send me whiny emails). You all know Jamie Lannister, right? Golden boy, rumored to be among the greatest swordsmen of Westeros, stabbed the Mad King Aerys Targaryen in the back? He kind of reminds me of what’s been going on with Goldman over the last decade or two.

Hear me out on this. Self-interested Jamie Lannister carries on an incestuous relationship that significantly contributes to causing a heinous period of deadly instability in Westeros. Profit-driven Goldman Sachs carries on an incestuous relationship with the credit rating agencies that significantly contributes to causing the worst recession since the Great Depression.

But the Kingslayer was hardly alone in his transgressions. Lancel Lannister was doing the same thing, for instance, and neither he nor Lehman Brothers came to a good end.

Jamie Lannister and Goldman Sachs both had to go through a bit of a rebuilding period. There’s a capture and confinement and lots of lessons on northern-style honor, some fatal cousin-bashing and some non-fatal amputation, along with, you know, a $10 billion taxpayer bailout. While the head of Jamie Lannister’s family was felled with a crossbow bolt to the bowels, the CEO of Goldman Sachs since 2006 just stepped down to spend more time on Twitter. Although when you stop to think about it, spending more time on Twitter is not really all that dissimilar from taking a crossbow bolt in the bowels….

A significant turning point for both of these golden lions comes as they get to know a couple just almost sickeningly moral characters. For Jamie it’s Brienne of Tarth, the oath-keeping, duty-doing warrior who he bestows with a new suit of armor and a sweet-ass Valyrian steel blade to help her keep fighting the good fight. For Goldman Sachs it’s IEX, the Investors Exchange, the scrappy little stock exchange founded with a mission of building fairer markets by financial industry insiders who gave up lucrative careers just to do the right thing and probably make a lot less money in the process.

Not only did Goldman Sachs put its support behind IEX’s application to become a U.S. stock exchange, it was the first financial industry giant to pump significant trading volume into IEX and thereby keep it from being starved out of existence by the other industry players who loathed it. If you read the book Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, Goldman Sachs actually becomes a minor hero, apparently simply because the company genuinely came to believe that fairer markets were good for everyone, except for the predatory high frequency traders.

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And in the wake of the full blossoming of these relationships, Jamie and Goldman both start to show real development. Jamie decides to honor his vow and leaves King’s Landing to do so, despite Cersei’s death threats. He honors Brienne by knighting her. He sets aside his differences with his former enemies and fights bravely alongside them against the Night King. A Lannister always pays his debts, after all.

Likewise does a Goldman, apparently. Goldman Sachs repaid the government for its bailout money, and then, several years later and right around the time it was cheerleading for IEX, agreed to pay an additional $5 billion settlement for its role in selling toxic mortgage-backed securities between 2005 and 2007. Now Goldman Sachs is partnering with Apple to issue a credit card that is so consumer-friendly that it might be a money-loser for the company, expanding local small business training programs, and even adding sex-reassignment surgery and fertility treatments to its employee benefits plan for some workers in an active effort to shed its reputation as “a conservative old boys’ club.”

“We are on an evolutionary path,” said Goldman’s current CEO David Solomon on an earnings call with analysts in April. Solomon also moonlights as an EDM DJ under the name D-Sol, because of course he does (seriously, I’m not making that up).

So, there you have it. Two peas in a pod. Of course, the GoT showrunners spent the last few episodes screwing up the nuanced and satisfying Jamie Lannister character arc they’d spent eight seasons building. Maybe George R.R. Martin will do better in the books. And maybe Goldman Sachs will do better in real life. I’m really hoping they stick with their Brienne.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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