I've been staying away from Colin Barr lately because he's been using her unique voice to say the same thing over and over - basically all link bait about Goldman Sachs and executive compensation non-scandals.
That said, he was in rare form yesterday afternoon writing about - Goldman Sachs and executive compensation non-scandals. What can I say? He's a delight to read when riding her favorite hobby horse.
His piece today is on why Goldman doesn't just go private.
So with each plan to rein in the big banks, the market drumbeat grows for Goldman to take its ball and go home. The firm should relinquish its New York Stock Exchange listing and return to a partnership structure, according to one popular theory.
But as much as CEO Lloyd Blankfein might like to restore Goldman to a state of richly compensated obscurity, it is unlikely to flee the stock market. Doing so would hardly silence the firm's many critics and, more important, could hurt business.
He quotes a former Goldman partner who is now a business school professor on why that is so.
"Going private doesn't solve their problems," said Roy C. Smith, a former Goldman partner who is now a finance professor at New York University. "It's not very practical on a number of levels, but especially because access to the public markets is essential for a trading firm."
As someone who thinks that Goldman's best communications strategy is to apologize the least it can get away with, I'm sympathetic to the going-private argument but this article shows why that isn't a current option. Basically, playing with other people's money is just too much fun.
Comments