The tyranny of conventional thinking

 

“What you as the City of London have done for financial services, we as a government intend to do for the economy as a whole.”

 

-       Gordon Brown, Mansion House speech, June 2002.  

 

Bloomberg reported rather excitedly last week that Goldman Sachs has retained its appeal to MBA students despite the bad press the brokerage company bank has received over the past year. In a recent survey of 6,207 MBA candidates by Universum Group, the great vampiric squid and financial services firm kept its fourth place in a poll rating students’ ‘most attractive employers’ behind, somewhat depressingly, consultants McKinsey and Bain & Co. Google was ranked first as most preferred prospective employer. MBA students can hardly be blamed for following the money, but one can legitimately ask why the opinions of MBA students are apparently so important given that MBA groupthink is surely one of the less examined factors behind the global financial crisis in the first place.

US President Obama last week took a leaf out of the UK anti-banker playbook and ignited his own jihad against the “obscene” bonus culture. Robert Jenkins of the London Business School articulated the problem well in a letter to the Financial Times:


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