Greg Smith isn’t done battling Wall Street, said Kevin Roose in New York magazine. Seven months after torching his former employer in a New York Times op-ed titled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” the former Goldman executive is back with a similarly titled book that sheds further light on the culture of greed he chose to walk away from. In response, Goldman has tried to paint the 33-year- old South African native as a disgruntled mid-level employee. The firm also conducted an internal investigation, following up on a Smith charge, and claims that it could find almost no email records indicating that Goldman bankers ever referred to their clients as “muppets.” Smith says the word choice is beside the point: The issue was that his colleagues saw their clients as clueless pawns.
But Goldman isn’t Smith’s only critic, said David Dolan in Reuters.com. Acknowledging the reviewers who’ve knocked his book for its lack of revelations, Smith says he wasn’t attempting a dramatic exposé. “I just wanted to give the Main Street people a window into what goes on,” he says. So far, he has no regrets about going turncoat. “When you’re trying to make an extra $2 million off a teachers’ retirement fund, it just doesn’t jibe with the values I felt,” he says. He’s hoping that the book will provide him with a springboard to continue advocating for investment reform. “I’m not anti-capitalism,” he says. “I just don’t like this notion that ethics and capitalism are different things.”
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