Who will sack Goldmann?

In all the complicated arguments back and forth on our TV screens and newspapers concerning the Goldman Sachs fraud investigation, the most compelling I find has nothing to do with weighty concepts like derivatives, hedge funds or subprime mortgages. Its a simple illustration a commentator came up with. If you were a used car salesman, he asks, would you sell a car with a faulty axle to a working man with his family, and then, bet that they would be in an accident before the weekend.

Because that would seem to sum up what they in fact did. When you surround yourself with the mumbo jumbo and jargon of high economics, when you wear a suit and tie to work, and when your society and peers applaud and richly reward you for what you are doing, it might seem that you are operating in a world beyond morals. It might make you feel like, as Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s CEO expressed it. “I am doing God’s work.”

In one sense that is an amazingly honest and accurate observation for him to make. In their ivory towers they do act as gods, and the whole world bows down. And was that not what was predicted as one of the results of eating the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden. “You shall be as gods”? And are we not all, to one degree or another, little gods, born to be creative, yes, but with a streak of self interest and greed inbuilt in us that drives us sometimes to the most inhuman of acts? We are little “goldmen”. And when self interest develops from personal selfishness to corporate selfishness or national selfishness, the results are clear - chaos in the Eurozone, panic in the markets, insecurity in the unemployment lines.

Thank God, that the future image that John reveals in the Book Revelation is not that of a bull or of a bear, but of “a lamb, as it had been slain”. And the Lamb, which epitomised unselfishness through its offering of itself as a sacrifice for sin, is deemed worthy. Worthy to receive “power and wealth, wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing”. Things that the executives of Goldmann Sachs might covet, and indeed think they possess, but which are a figment of their own imagination. Arturo Di Modica, who, in 1989 created the famous “Charging Bull” statue that stands near Wall St, New York, described his creation as a symbol of strength, power and hope for the American people for the future. Where is that hope now?