In March the New York Times published an article outlining an interview with Greg Smith. Greg Smith was resigning that day as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firms United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest investment banks in the world, had a big stake in the cause of the financial crisis. Firms like Goldman Sachs gambled with confidence on risky CDOs only because they bought insurance from the risk-laden AIG-bank, which they knew was drastically under-capitalized (Crotty, 2009). Greg Smith stated:

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Now project 10 years into the future: You dont have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesnt exactly turn into a model citizen. (New York Times, 14-3-2012)