Good news for people who've always wanted to work with Goldman Sachs or trust them, but not both. As Jeremy Quittner writes in Inc. Magazine (6/17/15), Goldman intends to enter the personal finance business. Now, if you want a loan of fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, you can borrow from one of the world's leading investment banks. It doesn't matter if you have a small business or a large credit card bill, you can get into bed with people who've screwed the largest corporations directly and you indirectly through the financial crisis of 2008, for which they are largely responsible. How can you trust a bank that's made a business - literally,
a business - of selling their own clients short? It's very hard except one thing is in their favor: Goldman Sachs has already paid a fine of $550 million and promised the U.S. government not to engage in deliberate fraud again. It's slim reed to hang your trust on, I know, but it consider it the cost of visiting 200 West Street on business.
Why, you may ask, is such a prestigious bank going from he baccarat table of advising governments to the slot machines of personal finance? Three reasons: one, they have repeatedly shown a contempt for their own reputation by being aggressively unethical and, only occasionally, illegal; two, their major stockholders don't care - go ahead, ask him - and, three, there's obviously a lot of money in it.
Tapping the low end of the consumer market is not a complete blight, however. There's one positive consequence: by offering personal loans, Goldman Sachs makes "payday" loans look respectable by comparison.
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