Lloyd Blankfein

Lloyd Craig Blankfein (born September 20, 1954) is an American business executive. He is the CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He assumed this position upon the May 2006 nomination of former CEO Henry Paulson to United States Secretary of the Treasury.

Biography

Early life
Lloyd Blankfein was born in the Bronx borough of New York City, to a Jewish family, and reared in the Linden Houses, a New York City Housing Authority project in the East New York section of Brooklyn. His father was a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service branch in the Manhattan borough of New York City and his mother was a receptionist. As a boy, he worked as a concession vendor at Yankee Stadium. and then Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. In 1981, he joined Goldman's commodities trading arm, J. Aron & Co., as a precious metals salesman in its London office.

He has served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs since 2006. He earned a total of $54.4 million in 2006 as one of the highest paid executives on Wall Street. His bonus reflected the performance of Goldman Sachs, which reported record net earnings of $9.5 billion. The compensation included a cash bonus of $27.3 million, with the rest paid in stock and options. While CEO of Goldman Sachs Group in 2007, Blankfein earned a total compensation of $53,965,418, which included a base salary of $600,000, a cash bonus of $26,985,474, stocks granted of $15,542,756 and options granted of $10,453,031.

In 2009, the Financial Times named Blankfein its "2009 Person of the Year", stating, "His bank has stuck to its strengths, unashamedly taken advantage of the low interest rates and diminished competition resulting from the crisis to make big trading profits." Critics of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street have taken issue with those practices. Taking a different view, Forbes listed Blankfein as one of "The Most Outrageous CEOs of 2009."

Source @ Wikipedia