Consequences: On the Drift of Discipline

Abstract

I opened this study with the recollection of the former chief of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson Jr., who remembers in his memoir On the Brink that he, after the revolving door had made him US Treasury Secretary, attended a dinner with some of Wall Street’s most powerful bankers, and how during the course of the dinner one of the bankers asked him: “Isn’t there something you can do to order us not to take all these risks?”