How Goldman Sachs went from apex predator to Wall Street laggard

THIRTEEN YEARS ago, when Rolling Stone described Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” the description stuck, not just because it was vivid, but because it was a little bit true. Goldman made pots of money, more than anyone else on Wall Street. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09, most of the big financial institutions that survived were left licking their wounds, paying back bail-outs and pleading for forgiveness. Not Goldman: in 2009 it raked in $13.4bn in profits, its best year ever at the time and a record that stood for more than a decade.