"Master of Risk", or blood-sucking squid?

"Master of Risk", or blood-sucking squid?

The Financial Times "Person of The Year" is Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs,

a tough, bright, funny (everyone remarks upon his unpretentious, wisecracking manner) financier who reoriented Goldman... [under whom] Its influence has spread throughout the world, from New York and London to Shanghai and São Paulo.

It's an interesting choice. There are many who would argue that - Blankfein's wiseracking notwithstanding - Goldman's influence around the world has been catastrophically destructive and malign at its very core, or as Rolling Stone put it:

The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Amusing hyperbole aside, there are some very serious questions still to be answered. 

While the FT says Blankfein "navigated the 2008 global financial crisis better than others on Wall Street", others are asking about his role in generating the crisis in the first place:

authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold [...] mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them.

The Big Picture blog quotes one insider summing up the practice:

When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

Goldman was not the only bank playing this game, but it certainly was one of the leaders, and the biggest beneficiary. 

That the FT has chosen to ignore these issues is more than puzzling, as is the hagiographic tone of much of the article, with some passages seemingly cut straight from Mr Blankfein's CV:

He swims and runs to keep in shape, although his weight fluctuates. [...] He devotes some time to philanthropy, including chairing a taskforce at Harvard on financial aid.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that Blankfein himself "declined to be interviewed for the article" despite its overwhelmingly positive tone. Perhaps there are some things he would rather not talk about, under any circumstances?