About Lloyd Blankfein
Lloyd Blankfein released a memoir titled *Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs* in April 2026 and conducted a series of media interviews to promote the book. In these appearances, he discussed his upbringing in public housing in Brooklyn, his experience as an outsider at Harvard, and his rise to become CEO of Goldman Sachs. On the subject of higher education, Blankfein said he believes young people should not skip college to chase money and fame. He also commented on Harvard, stating that governmental scrutiny caused the university to make "course corrections."
In multiple interviews, Blankfein argued that the financial system is accumulating risk that could lead to a future crisis. He used the metaphor of "dry tinder" building up on a forest floor, stating that a long period without a major crisis has led to complacency and the overvaluation of private assets. Blankfein said the next crisis would be harder to contain than 2008 because reforms have spread risk beyond the reach of regulators, though he noted that such distributed risk makes the system safer for smaller shocks. He attributed Goldman's survival of the 2008 crisis to its rigorous mark-to-market accounting and risk culture, and stated that if other banks had managed themselves the same way, there would not have been a banking crisis.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Lloyd Blankfein's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:04
What are the remote possibilities you'd be most worried about today?
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Lloyd Blankfein0:06
Nothing that ever happens looks in hindsight like it was remote, because it happened. But today it probably won't be criminality or North Korea. It probably might be a mistake or a flawed program that sells all your assets for a quarter of the value and you can't pull it back, an error in some piece of code, something like that. That's something that one has to worry about, not something that's inevitable.
Some things that are inevitable that would be so concerned is how we manage interest rates going back to what I'll call normal, but normal by history. If everybody owns paper that has been issued at half a percent, one percent, two percent, and interest rates go to, you know, ten-year interest rates go to five percent, not an unreasonable place for them to be if you look at over history, what happens to the mark to market on everybody's portfolio in the world, any instrument ever issued that still extends.
As a result of low interest rates, people have been taking extra credit risk, maybe sovereign risk, but extra credit risk in order to get higher yields. That will break people's hearts because things are stable, but if the market gets disrupted, it tends to be the weaker credits that separate from the stronger credits. So there's a number of things that can go wrong when money starts to get allocated by assigning a cost to money that's more inconsistent with history, and that's a long way from where we are now in the market.
Are we about to have an inflation problem? There's a lot of remedies in the world, painful as they are, for inflation. It's very hard to get rid of deflation. So if you had an error on one side or another, you would err on allowing a certain amount of inflation to take place and not want to get yourself into a kind of deflationary, see Japan for 25 years as a reference.
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Interviewer2:26
Seeing this from both sides, it sounds to me like you think the Fed is doing just about the right thing now.
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Lloyd Blankfein2:33
I respect the Fed for standing up to a lot of pressure. And I think, again, deflation is a terrible thing. Inflation you could tolerate. I mean, it's bad, and I can go through all the things and how unevenly inflation affects different segments of the population, but it's easy to deal with. In inflation, you go out and you buy things now because it's going to get more expensive. When you have deflationary expectations, you say, you know something, I'll wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow you wake up, you say, I'll wait another day because it's getting cheaper and easier, etc. And so that really is a heart, then you really are in the economic doldrums.
