In my March 17 blog about the resignation of Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs, I predicted the story would become a big one. According to the Wall Street Journal, Smith’s Op-Ed missile in the New York Times drew three million page views by the afternoon of publication. It quickly trended in the top ten messages on Twitter. My Google search for “goldman sachs, greg smith” this morning yielded 44,300,000 pages. The infosphere is humming over the matter.
Smith has drawn heaps of praise for the way he showed Goldman the middle finger. But while he has lots of admirers, many of them citing other examples of huffy employees spilling their guts on the way out the door, he’s also drawn a surprising amount of criticism—and not just from business commentators or other hard-core capitalists. Populist, anti-business sentiment clearly has its limits.
Meanwhile, Goldman is reviewing Smith’s claims, and searching its email records for “muppets,” to identify employees who insulted clients and handed its detractors a soundbite from hell. It’ll also look for other offensive terms, but hasn’t said what will happen to staff who used them. (In America, “muppet” was popularized by the hit TV show of that name featuring Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, and other cuddly characters. In Britain, it’s a label for stupid, gullible people.)
The debate is on.