Lloyd Blankfein

We had unlimited liability.

There's nothing that focuses your attention better than being, you know, your partnership.

You're investing client money, and you're not leveraging your own money.

You know, the partners not only had their capital accounts at risk, they had their homes at risk.

I remember when I became a partner,

I said, should I be putting my house in my wife's name?

And it was very funny because then the minister of the interior, this was back when we were a partnership, said, you know, Lloyd, no partner at Goldman Sachs has ever lost money because of losses at the firm.

But plenty of Goldman Sachs partners have lost money because they put assets in their spouse's name.

So that was it.

And it was a funny line, but by the way, like a lot of funny lines.

True, true.

And so, but it did focus your attention and it made us very, very... Totally.

Totally on it and risk managers are very attentive to risk.

And now one of the consequences of that concern, we marked things to market rigorously, religiously, and other people didn't.

Yep.

They didn't have...

Do you think if the crisis had stemmed in like the private equity ecosystem, which I imagine the firm had a lot more kind of notional exposure to, it would have navigated as well or, you know?

No, it would have been tougher because it's hard to mark to market.

Now, what we did, we also had instruments that were one-off, you know,

We had a lot of loan commitments related to our M&A.