It's probably not a coincidence that a Christian politician advocates homosexual rape as a solution to America's financial problems, fair enough, it works fine for their priests.
He's also ignorant of history, not just the medieval/Tudor stuff that Bob cites, but shit that happened yesterday. Insider traders quite regularly do time, doesn't seem to prevent it. America executes more people than China, but actually has about the same frequency of violvent deaths over the last year as Libya. Deterrence doesn't work on criminals.
Also, my firm now sponsors Shakespeare's Globe in London, so I'm quite happy to retaliate through the Bard, and point out that Bassanio is an exemplar of good risk management in having his highly sepculative financial investments (ships trading) spread over several ventures, and not wishing to be a spoiler, good risk management foils the nasty Jewish moneylender and the good Christians crap all over him, a plot to warm the heart of any good evangelical.
"My ventures are not in one bottom trusted"...
Also, there apparently exist people who think that in some ways Mr. Blankfein is more powerful than I am. Yes, I know how stupid that sounds, but he is CEO of some finance outfit, which impresses evangelicals enough to make them think he actually controlls stuff.
CEOs don't control things, they make speeches, make some of the big decisions, but they don't control. Many spend literally weeks trying to work out what kind of stone their new corporate HQ should be covered in (yes, really).
No one is smart enough to run a bank. GS has people who modify motherboards for high frequency trading, who defend it against the queue of lawsuits from the women who've worked for it, who trade in >50,000 different financial instruments, who train people to trade these instruments, or who HR the people who train the people who trade...They have men with guns, and people running creches.
There's at least 40 different kinds of risk manager at GS, who if they are passionate about their work all suspect that something really bad could happen in their area real soon, and would really like an hour with him to explain that.
No one understands this stuff, all any one man can do is try and hire good people, kick out some of the bad ones, and shout "do good work" from a high place.
Fact is that if he had understood the problem, and had the power he'd have stopped it.
I've never had Mr. Blankfein over for dinner, so I cannot say if he is a good man, but the demands of his own wallet imply that he'd have tried really quite hard to stop the shit we went through, if he could.