Embarrassing emails aren’t new to Wall Street. After the dotcom bubble, star tech analysts were condemned for sending messages mocking the same stocks they urged investors to buy. Now Goldman Sachs is in the spotlight after Senate investigators uncovered correspondence from current and former executives which suggest they were anticipating the collapse of the mortgage market even as they flogged related products to clients.
What’s most striking about the messages, however, is who wrote them. Goldman’s senior executives have long preferred voicemail over email for confidential communication. Indeed, some Goldman bankers believe it was this technological difference that helped the bank to dodge the Internet-related scandals that tainted rivals Merrill Lynch and Citigroup: voicemails are harder for investigators to scan.Goldman is still a heavy user of voicemail. After the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against the bank, Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein used company-wide voicemail messages to convey his defiance to employees. But emails released by the Senate subcommittee on investigations – and by the bank itself – suggest an increasing dependence on written messages.
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