Goldman Sachs announced this week that the investment bank will no longer help take a company public unless said company has at least one “diverse” board member.

Forbes magazine rushed to heap praise on this bold move by saying "It’s commendable that the company is making an effort to drive more diversity" and "Goldman should be applauded for their efforts".

The hypocrisy of this announcement is too extreme to even make a joke about it.

Forget for a moment that this commitment to diversity doesn't apply to Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

It doesn't even apply to Goldman Sachs.

However, the real hypocrisy in this empty gesture is pretending to care about women and minorities (by 'diversifying the ruling elite') while making their fortunes by robbing and pillaging the tens of millions of women and minorities in the working class.



As The Nation writer Robert B. Reich put it “The investment bank (Goldman Sachs) made millions by helping to hide the true extent of the debt, and in the process almost doubled it.“ Additionally, and also relatively recently, the US Department of Justice found Goldman Sachs liable for their role in the 2008 (subprime) financial crisis in the United States, which had a lot of international blowback as well affecting economies globally. According to Business Insider up to 10,000,000 homes were lost between 2006-2014 as a result of the crisis that Goldman Sachs bears partial responsibility for. Meaning that when it comes to the real life suffering of millions of Americans and Greeks (and beyond) who lost their jobs, homes, or social safety net, Goldman Sachs doesn’t give a damn. Forcing a handful of diversity hires (even if these were demonstrably proven to be a boon for society) would be one drop of generous blessing in a canyon of financial sins.

To say that Goldman Sachs bears partial responsibility for the 2008 crash, the 2011 Euro crises, and the financialized economic recovery that has benefited the wealthy exclusively is an understatement.

Goldman Sachs has been the architect of these financial sins.



The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Robert S. Kaplan), the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Neel Kashkari), the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (Steve Mnuchin), the President of the European Central Bank (Mario Draghi) and the head of the Bank of England (Mark Carney) all have two things in common: they sit atop vast amounts of money and they are all alums of Goldman Sachs. In addition, the immediate past President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley, which secretly sluiced over $29 trillion to bail out Wall Street banks during the financial crisis and has now opened its money spigot for trillions of dollars more, worked at Goldman Sachs for more than two decades, rising to the rank of partner and U.S. Chief Economist.

Besides foreclosure king Steve Mnuchin, Steve Bannon had previously worked in Mergers and Acquisitions at Goldman, and Gary Cohn was the former Chief Operating Officer of Goldman.

Goldman Sachs dominated Trump's cabinet, in addition to having outsized influence over financial policy both in the U.S. and Europe for over a decade.

And what is this financial policy leading us to? Nothing good.



On Monday, a member of the New York Fed’s own Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets, Scott Minerd, published a critique which he headlined as follows: “Global Central Banks Fueling a Ponzi Market,” with this scary subhead: “Ultimately, investors will awaken to the rising tide of defaults and downgrades.” The thrust of the article is that central banks (which include the New York Fed’s Wall Street money spigot that was launched on September 17, 2019) are creating a Ponzi scheme of liquidity that is hiding the true state of risk in both the stock and bond markets.

But we've got diversity among the ruling elite!