From Tiger Woods and Mel Gibson to Akio Toyoda and Bernie Madoff, images of famous, powerful men apologizing have become a mainstay of popular culture—an iconography of shame. So it was refreshing to watch the stubborn refusal of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein to beg forgiveness before a U.S. Senate panel this week. The hearings followed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s mid-April move to charge the investment bank with fraud over alleged double-dealing of mortgage-related debt instruments a few years ago. Goldman categorically denies the allegations as “completely unfounded,” and CEO Lloyd Blankfein stuck to script as he was grilled by congressmen about financial arrangements and deals far too complex to be discussed here. Suffice to say, what the US government calls double-dealing, Blankfein calls prudent hedging against risk, without which Goldman could have gone the way of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros. and the dodo. In the politically charged public arena of a Senate panel hearing—where politicians clamour to denounce the alleged wrongdoer in what BusinessWeek astutely calls “the theater of aggressive reform”—Blankfein could not reasonably foresee any kind of PR victory beyond maintaining his dignity. By sticking to his guns, he managed that, at least. Touchdown, Lloyd Blankfein.
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