Lloyd Blankfein

I would say the people at the time with what was available did very well because it was unknown and unknowable.

And again, we're dealing with the risk of a problem and not necessarily the certainty.

And so they went into some wrong directions.

They dealt with things in a gross way.

Just let's bring it to something where that's more current in people's experience.

Let's say the start of COVID.

Mm-hmm.

And you want to go and you're worried about, you know, worried about the economy getting wrecked.

And so you come out with a stimulus plan and you're going to mail checks to people.

If you had a few years to do that, you might design it so that you were only, you know, you're only sending checks to people who really needed the money.

better, it would have been less fraud, it would have been better targeted, but you didn't have the time and you didn't have the tools to be able to do that.

So you say, you know something, we're sitting here, we'll do a retroactive examination about it and we'll find 50 things that were done wrong, but really can you say that the people at the time, the decision makers,

performed badly given what they had to work with and the speed with which they had to execute.

No, so I would say looking back, things could have been done much differently, but at the time, and I was present and watching, I think they did a very good job with what was available at the moment.

And again, the exigencies of the moment

What do you think we did with respect to the financial crisis?

These are parallel fields of human endeavor.

They're not the same thing, but they rhyme.

Basically, it's fundamental.

We're dealing with human nature.