Monday, April 16, 2012

Gorman’s Lonely Quest to Save Wall Street’s Honor


There has been a noticeable dearth of leadership on Wall Street after the financial crisis. Bloomberg's William D. Cohan writes.  Where are the senior execs willing to explain to the American people how and why the financial industry’s behavior got our economy into so much trouble.   Wall Street’s purported top rung -- Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs; and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase  -- have been too busy either defending their own indefensible actions leading up to the crisis (Blankfein) or complaining about how new regulations are impeding profitability (Dimon) to give any thought to fundamentally changing the way Wall Street does business. So far, they have shown the opposite of leadership: blatant self-interest...

Fortunately, as Aristotle taught us, nature abhors a vacuum. And into the leadership breach has quietly stepped the Australian-born James Gorman, the 53-year-old former McKinsey & Co. consultant and Merrill Lynch & Co. executive who has been the CEO of Morgan Stanley since 2010 and both chairman and CEO since the beginning of the year. In his unassuming way, Gorman has come out swinging….

No comments:

Post a Comment