Lloyd Blankfein

What are you doing about something?

No matter if you could think and conceive that it could happen, tell me now what you're going to do about it or what you're doing already to mitigate the consequences.

And that's risk management goals.

I remember going around a room.

you know, at various financial crises that we've had, I said, okay, we're in risk management mode.

And somebody will say, well, I think, and I go, I don't care what you think.

And then that person would say, oh, if you don't care what I think, don't tell me what you think.

And I said, I don't care what I think.

I just want to know what's in the realm of the possible

and what we're going to do if that happens.

And if you do a good job at that, when things happen, as they did in the global financial crisis and in the dot-com bubble and in long-term capital, and we had the crisis of the century like every four or five years,

When you do good contingency planning, you get off the mark so quickly when something adverse happens that people think you anticipated, that you guessed it.

And no, you were just a very, very, very good reactor.

So again, two different modes.

We were big risk takers.

We tried to get the market right.

But sometimes when things we didn't understand what was going on, we'd go into risk management mode, try to get closer to home and try to think of all the things that could affect our balance sheet.

And our balance sheet was huge.

So nothing could happen anywhere in the world that didn't affect us.

And by the way, about 90% of the time they accused us of causing it anyway.