Excerpts · Lloyd Blankfein · Streetwise · Mar 09, 2026

An Excerpt from Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs

by Lloyd Blankfein

From the long-tenured head of an institution legendary for its culture of success, a candid memoir of global leadership in an age of extreme turbulence.

When Lloyd Blankfein was attacked as a Wall Street fat cat, he had to smile, thinking of his precarious childhood in the notorious public housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn, and attending a high school so chaotic he didn’t feel safe leaving class to go to the bathroom in his time there. Harvard University was a total moonshot, and his outsider status never wore off, there or at Harvard Law. When he struck people as street-y, it wasn’t Wall Street they were thinking of. But if the chip never quite left Blankfein's shoulder, neither did a wry, resilient spirit and a lucid, democratic intelligence that saw through airs and found talent and ideas in unlikely places.

Streetwise is a delightfully honest, sharp and often very funny reckoning with the author’s education—in finance, human nature, and the workings of the world. It abounds with lessons about leading teams of brilliant, aggressive, competitive people and harmonizing them around shared goals; changing when times are hard and when they’re good; managing risk; and knowing a crisis is at hand before it swamps you so you can guide your team to the further shore. Blankfein is famed for his calm hand on Goldman Sachs’s tiller during the global financial crisis, and that story is told in full here, among many other decisive episodes.

Suffusing Streetwise is the author’s deep and abiding respect for the partnership culture of Goldman Sachs. We follow the never-ending work to protect and preserve that culture through all sorts of tumult—the challenge behind every other challenge. He is open about when he and the firm got it wrong, which was often enough, but the creative, risk-taking spirit was never snuffed—even as the fail-safes put in place to protect the firm and its clients held when they were needed the most. A powerful blueprint for the wise stewardship of a cause that is larger than yourself, Streetwise will inspire and inform readers throughout the global business community and beyond.

The excerpt below is adapted from Chapter 28: "Risk Is Risky."

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I want to say a few words about what I see as the great strength of the American economy: its remarkable resilience. It is amazing that the US remains the fastest growing of all the developed modern economies even as it is by far the biggest. Usually size works against adaptability. In our case, the opposite seems to be true—even when the US is ground zero for a global crisis, as it was in 2008. As in previous market downturns following the Russian default in 1998, the dot- com crash in 2000, and the global pandemic in 2020, we came back stronger and faster than anyone else. As Warren Buffett likes to say, never bet against the US economy. “For 240 years it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America,” he wrote in his 2016 letter to his shareholders. It’s time to update that. It’s been a terrible mistake for 250 years.

If the US economy is the most successful in the world, the reasons are its culture around risk, resilience, and recovery, and its particular style of mildly fettered capitalism. What does it mean to have an economy that can bounce back quickly from setbacks and crises? Our success flows in part from being an individualistic society that views risk-takers as admirable and is always inclined to give them another chance after they fail. In America, resilience is most prized, more than unearned or easily earned success. Steve Jobs wouldn’t have been Steve Jobs if he hadn’t been fired from Apple and come back. The same can be said for Jamie Dimon, who relaunched his career at Bank One after Sandy Weill fired him from Citigroup. In the US, you aren’t limited to merely recovering your reputation. If you emerge well from a crisis, you can come out ahead. When I advise leaders who are getting overwhelmed by a problem or bad press, the first thing I say is, “Congratulations. You just satisfied the precondition for a fantastic display of resilience and character!”

Resilience also applies at the government level. There are inevitable moments when government has to intervene to prevent capitalism from destroying itself. What John Maynard Keynes called “animal spirits” can get out of hand, as happened in the run‑up to the global financial crisis. Only the government has a balance sheet big enough to restore faith in the system when it periodically melts down.

After the global financial crisis, legislators clamored for new rules to make sure it would never happen again. That is a vain hope. Capitalism by its nature runs to excess and attempts to prevent the possibility of future financial crises are probably doomed to fail. When crises occur, my view is that government should step in to restore confidence, let the chips fall where they deserve to fall, and then get out of the way again.

Two out of three ain’t bad, you might say. We recovered from the financial crisis better than other countries because, however messy it seemed at the time, the government did restore confidence and did let management and shareholders in failed financial institutions bear the consequences of their mistakes. Getting out of the way again is a little more complicated. Hungry to find, humiliate, and punish individual malefactors, the body politic demands that the system not go back to the way it was. That political dynamic can lead to rules that go too far in dampening the animal spirits that are so essential to innovation and growth. Trying to legislate against a once‑in‑a‑century crisis risks causing slower growth for all the generations in between. The only way to get rid of the tail risk is to get rid of the whole tail—to ban risk- taking at scale and turn the entire economy into a T‑bill.

In practice, we have our show trials, get them over relatively quickly, and get back to business. I remember sitting with John Rogers in Senator Chris Dodd’s office after the crisis to discuss the eponymous legislation he was drafting. It was a friendly and constructive conversation, and we seemed to agree on almost everything. We got interrupted when Senator Dodd said he had to go to the floor for a vote. He returned to our meeting about ten minutes later. What did you vote on? I asked him. Oh—a hundred- percent tax on bankers’ bonuses, he said. He’d voted in favor. It wasn’t one of the topics that had come up when we were finding common ground.

But soon enough the finger- pointing winds down and the financial cycle revs up again. We get back on the road and start driving fast again. By contrast, Europe took more than a decade to recover from the last crisis, and in many respects the overhang is with it still.

So much of resilience comes from having a better understanding of risk, something our nature and emotions often work against. People are generally bad at thinking objectively and historically. We overvalue the present and recent past, thinking that the events we’re living through are unique and unprecedented. They never really are. Of course, the worst crisis is always the one you’re living through, because you don’t know if or how it’s going to be resolved. It’s hard to be afraid of something that’s resolved and on the shelf of history. The present, by contrast, is unresolved, with the potential to keep getting worse.

How often do I hear people say the country has never been through a more dangerous time? Nonsense—we had a civil war. Okay, that was a long time ago. But in my lifetime, I saw my parents transfixed, watching the television news during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were enforcing a blockade around Cuba, forcing Soviet ships to turn around on the high seas, which is an act of war. (We called it a “quarantine” instead of a blockade.) It was the only time the US military has gone to DEFCON 2 status. DEFCON 1 is imminent or active nuclear war. President Kennedy went on television to prepare the country for just that possibility.

People say our society has never been more polarized. Nonsense again—my early memories also include the assassinations of JFK, Medgar Evers, RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr. When I was in high school, the National Guard was shooting kids protesting the Vietnam War on college campuses, at Kent State and Jackson State—the latter got more attention in the mostly Black neighborhood where I grew up. Kids were moving to Canada to avoid the draft. In 1968, revolution seemed to be breaking out everywhere in the world—there were barricades in the streets in Paris and tanks in the streets of Prague. I find it reassuring that we have navigated worse times than the ones we are in. If our parents and grandparents got through the Cold War, Vietnam, and the upheavals of the 1960s, there’s no reason to be pessimistic about our ability to get through lesser dangers today.

Every so often, when a young person asks my advice on what to study in college as preparation for a career in finance, I always recommend history rather than math or economics. I say that because it is valuable to have a sense of what has happened before, a consciousness of historical cycles, and the ability to distinguish secular changes from the kind that tend to recede and recur. That kind of perspective helps you keep your head on when things go awry and keeps you from getting too cocky when things go well. Ultimately, an awareness of history makes you a better boss, a better leader, and a better risk manager. It makes you better able to practice resilience, knowing that things do recover.