Bailout

How Goldman Sachs is still running New Jersey

By Felix Salmon

Who is responsible for turning New Jersey governor Chris Christie from an uninspiring and inchoate peddler of conservative platitudes into the major anti-union force that he is today? Step up, Mr Squid:

Christie won by about four points on Election Night in 2009, with little notion of what he was going to do next. When I asked him if there was any one moment of clarity that put him on the path from cautious candidate to union-bashing conservative hero, Christie pointed to a meeting about a month into the transition, when his aides came to him brandishing an analysis of the state?s cash flow produced by Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs, of course, is the company where the CEO recently said of his employees that “If we could do it, we would have their bonus be 100 percent of their comp” — in other words, no salary whatsoever, no job security, give all the power to management and give the workers no rights at all.

All of which makes Christie’s improbable victory over former Goldman chairman Jon Corzine so much more ironic. Only someone who has beaten a squid himself, it seems, is capable of taking Goldman’s advice to its logical conclusions.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on February 24, 2011 (boomark / email).