Ex-Goldman Sachs banker lashes out at its practices

A Goldman Sachs banker has launched a withering attack on the bank in a newspaper column announcing his resignation, saying that some managing directors at the Wall Street firm had referred to their own clients as “muppets”.

In an opinion column for yesterday’s New York Times, Greg Smith, who worked in equity derivatives, said Goldman had become “as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it”.

“It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ’muppets’,” he said.