You want to become CEO of Goldman Sachs? Start taking notes. Those who wait comfortably on the platform sans signal can look forward to a life of middle management.

At one point in his career, Mr. Blanfkein traded the Japanese yen and while out of the office got currency trades on his pager. In those days, before he had a driver, he typically took the Seventh Avenue subway line home and often waited for the train at the top of the subway stairs rather than stand on the underground platform where his pager wouldn’t work. When the train came, he would make a run for it, ensuring he had the latest quotes before heading underground.

[Dealbook]

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Yesterday during Lloyd Blankfein’s testimony at the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading trial, Blankfein noted that, professionally, he prefers using voicemail to email. This is not a Lloyd quirk but something of an institutionalized “thing” at Goldman, where management has, for years now, been known to fill up employees phones with messages, rather than typing them out. The messages can range from morale boosters (LB left one for the staff last April around the time of the SEC investigation into ABACUS), to administrative and everything in between. For example, there was the time Hank Paulson left a firm-wide message, telling the staff he’d said some stuff he didn’t mean.

Mr. Blankfein’s predecessor as chief executive, Henry M. Paulson Jr., was also a fan of the spoken word. Voice mail was his preferred method of communication and in 2002 he famously used voice mail staffwide to apologize for his “80-20″ comment, when he remarked that 20 percent of the staff add 80 percent of the value. “It was glib and totally insensitive response, which is totally at odds with the way I think about the people here,” he told employees in a voice mail.

If that sounds awkward, it doesn’t really compare to the message he left for Jon Corzine one night not too long after pushing him out, telling him “it’s not you it’s me,” in an attempt to bury the hatchet, footage of which we’ve been able to obtain.

Goldman’s Love Affair With Voicemail [Dealbook]

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Under cross-examination by Rajaratnam’s lawyer John Dowd, Blankfein said he tried to talk Gupta out of quitting the board on September 12, 2008, not wanting to project instability to the market. But by the time Gupta’s decision not to stand for re-election became known in March 2010, things had changed. “I knew there was questions about Rajat’s behavior, that’s how I would say it,” Blankfein said. [Portfolio]

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Gang, something serious just happened during the Lloyd Blankfein Day of the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading trial. Someone needs to be removed from the court immediately and if the judge won’t do anything about it, we will. We’e not talking about Raj, or his 700 lawyers or the prosecution or Lloyd. We’re talking about the person responsible for THIS:

In what universe does that look like LB? This illustrator needs to be remanded without bail, markers confiscated.

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As you might have heard, Lloyd Blankfein has been testifying this morning in the Raj Rajaratnam trial. Lloyd is there because one of Rajaratnam’s alleged insider trades was based on information he received from former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta. To recap, Gupta took part in a fall 2008 conference call with GS management and fellow board members and after hanging up, made himself wait exactly twenty three seconds before getting Raj on the horn. Was this cool with LB and was it considered an acceptable course of action for those lucky enough to be part of Goldman’s inner sanctum, prosecutors asked?

You bet your asses it was not.

“On that call, did Rajat Gupta violate Goldman Sachs’s confidentiality policy?” Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Michaelson asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Blankfein said.

Mr. Blankfein wore a dark suit. He smiled at the gathered gaggle of reporters covering the trial as he walked in the courtroom and gestured with his hands as testified.

Blankfein: Gupta Violated Board Confidentiality [WSJ]

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Last week, Charlie Gasparino reported that he’d spoken to a bunch of Lloyd Blankfein’s ‘friends,’ who’d told him that Blankfein a) hates his job running Goldman Sachs and b) has been saying he’s going to leave the firm by the end of the year. Goldman denied the report, promising Lloyd will be with us for years to come. False!, Chaz claimed and today provides names of two executives who will potentially take over for Lloyd at some point in the future.

They are vice-chairmen Michael Evans or Michael Sherwood, the latter of which will succeed the firm’s Gary Cohn as chairman of the partnership committee, it was announced in a memo yesterday. All of this, CG says, is proof his story is more spot on than Goldman would have you believe, and proof that he is all-knowing. Speaking of which, CG asked his Fox Business colleagues, “What, is Lucas van Praag clairvoyant? How does he know I haven’t spoken to Lloyd’s friends, who’ve told me he’s leaving?” (CEO’s up and down Wall Street also backed him up, Chaz says.)

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[via BI]

Earlier: Goldman Sachs Denies Gasparino Report, Promises Lloyd Will Never Leave Us

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RBS CEO Stephen Hester was recently asked by Parliament to defend his bonus for 2011, which clocked in at around £7.7m. Some might argue the Brits had the right to do so in light of the fact that about 82 percent of the bank is owned by the government. The two sides brought slightly different opinions to the table, Hester being of the mind that the his paycheck was well-deserved, and the MP’s being in strong disagreement, given that RBS recently reported net losses for a third consecutive year.

Things got quite heated, with Labour MP Austin Mitchell asking, “What have you done for £7.7m? Is it that you produced an outstanding enormous profit for the bank, or is it because you are a greedy banker?” Hester, taking umbrage at the suggestion that a) he didn’t earn every pound of his package and that b) he was in anyway greedy sought fit to lay some truth on Mitchell and Co’s asses, telling them his number was “at the low end of comparable jobs in the UK and globally.” An interesting theory!

Here’s what some other bank CEO’s earned this year:

Jamie Dimon: £10.9m
Bob Diamond: £10.1m
Lloyd Blankfein: £7.9m
Josef Ackermann: £7.8m
James Gorman: £4.625m
Vikram Pandit: £0.0m
Oswald Grübel: £0.0m

So overall, Hester is actually more toward the middle on comp but if we’re comparing him to people with actual ‘comparable’ jobs (i.e. guys running firms who’ve only recently begun to emerge from the era of getting their asses handed to them, like Vickles and Grübel and/or were at one time a ward of the state), he’s making out pretty well. But you know what? Those are just numbers and whether he’s at the top end or the bottom shouldn’t actually matter because here’s what- no one’s got a gun pointed to his/her head that will go off if they don’t keep Hester happy. “No one’s forced to employ me,” he said. The bottom line is RBS’s board and shareholders want to pay Hest this much and if they didn’t they’d give him the boot. Speaking of which, let’s make sure Big Daddy sees a few more zeros next year, okay? This time around.

“It is in the hands of others how they want to pay me for that and it is up to me whether I want to do the job for that.”

You’ve all been warned.

RBS Boss: ‘My £7.7m Pay Is At The Low End’ [SN]

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As previously discussed, one of the bigger revelations that could cause issues for Raj Rajaratnam is that his “business associate and friend,” Rajat Gupta, passed him inside information obtained from Gupta’s post as a board member of Goldman Sachs, which the Galleon founder proceeded to (allegedly!) trade on. In one particular instance, on October 23, 2008, Gupta rang up Rajaratnam twenty three seconds after an informative call with Lloyd Blankfein about the company’s financial situation. The swiftness with which Gupta funneled information to his pal presumably pleased Raj greatly, as it was a characteristic he looked for in all of his tipsters, going so far as to put it at the top of the ‘must haves’ in the listing for the gig.  So you can imagine that the hedge fund manager was not at all pleased when Rajat tried to resign from the Goldman board and dry up his well.

On September 9, 2008 Gupta apparently submitted a resignation letter to Goldman, as he hoped to take a job as a senior advisor at KKR. Luckily for Rajaratnam, Lloyd Blankfein convinced Gupta to stay on board, fearing the market’s reaction to having a director resign at that point in time. Prior to LB sitting Gupta down for a talk, though, the prospect of losing one of his best men was very real to Raj-Raj, who likely sweat bullets for weeks over the situation, including during an August 15, 2008 call, released Friday by prosecutors, in which he discusses Gupta’s potential move with Anil Kumar. At first, Raj remains calm, thinking out the why’s and the how’s of it all.

“Goldman is one board right,” Mr. Rajaratnam says on the recording. “And he’s, you know, he’s essentially an observer status, right? He’s not in there, you know, rolling up his sleeves.”

So maybe it’s this conflict of interest business, Raj thinks aloud, and Rajat is just trying to do things by the book. Or is it the fact that Rajat is a greedy jerk, who apparently doesn’t care he’s leaving Rajaratnam in the trenches, sans material, non-public information?

“But is it really that he was so greedy for the $12 million that K.K.R. has offered him?” Mr. Kumar asks on the recording.

It’s like all this selfish prick can think about is money, you know? Money and prestige.

“I think he wants to be in that circle,” Mr. Rajaratnam says. “That’s a billionaire circle, right? Goldman is like the hundreds of millions circle, right?”

He may also be obsessed with Henry Kravis.

“My analysis of the situation is he’s enamored with Kravis.”

Plus, there’s the fact that he’s really lazy. It’s not like he knows what it’s like to do an honest day of hard work. You think Rajat has any idea how exhausting it is gathering inside information to (allegedly) trade on? He doesn’t know jack.

Rajaratnam added: “And I think here he sees the opportunity to make $100 million over the next five years or 10 years without doing a lot of work.”

But this isn’t about being worried about losing a top earner at all! I hope no one’s thinking that.

Mr. Rajaratnam and Mr. Kumar also seem worried about their friend. “At some point, what I worry about is that there can be this massive implosion in him,” Mr. Kumar said. “He didn’t seem comfortable,” Mr. Rajaratnam said. “He seemed like he was tormented, right?”

Best to pass on the KKR job and keep the stress levels down. This is coming from a friend, who just wants what’s best for the Gups.

Gupta Sought To Quit Goldman In 2008 [Dealbook]

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In 2006, Rajat K. Gupta founded New Silk Route, a ‘hybrid private equity and hedge fund vehicle,’ which counted people like Raj Rajaratnam as partners. Today, perhaps but not definitely in light of the news Gupta called the Galleon founder with inside information he’d obtained from Lloyd Blankfein 23 seconds after getting it, Rajat has decided to take some time away from the firm.

Rajat K. Gupta has taken a voluntary leave of absence from New Silk Route Partners…Gupta said he was taking the leave to “avoid any distraction and ensure New Silk Route’s continued focus on the execution of its investment strategy,” according to a statement from the company today. The move is effective immediately.

Gupta Takes Leave Amid SEC Charges [Bloomberg]

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