Lloyd Blankfein has taken to the op-ed page of Politico to
extol investing in America, Reuters reports. But Blankfein’s champion-of-America pose doesn’t square with
the fact Goldman is now an avowedly transnational company. They invented the
term “BRICs” and have spent the last decade hyping the growth potential of
Brazil, Russia, India and China. Since 2006, the firm has held an annual board
meeting in each BRIC country, with the Middle East also thrown in for good
measure. More recently, Goldman has moved on to evangelizing an even longer
list of “growth markets“. And the bank’s success depends, as Bankfein’s said
last year, on “chasing GDP” across the globe. Right now, that means doing a
massive IPO for a state-owned Malaysian agro-conglomerate from offices in
Singapore and Hong Kong.
Blankfein may be touting US investment when he meets with
clients, but he’s doing something different with the business he runs. Between 2006 and 2011, Goldman saw its number
of counterparties in the US and Western Europe grow by 21% and 22%
respectively. That seems pretty good until you see what happened in Asia (+59%)
or in Eastern Europe (+89%). And it’s downright pathetic compared to the
whopping 142% increase in counterparties that Goldman saw in Latin America.
From 2000 to 2010, the region where Goldman was best been able to turn GDP
growth into revenues was Asia...
Goldman Sachs advising clients to do one thing and then
doing another? Been there, done that...
Read all about it at http://blogs.reuters.com/ben-walsh/2012/07/19/goldman-the-rest-of-you-should-invest-in-america/
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