Goldman exec resigns with a blistering farewell

Goldman Sachs, arguably the most storied investment bank on Wall Street, has been compared to a money-sucking vampire squid and called the evil empire of finance.



On Wednesday it got an entirely different kind of black eye — delivered by one of its own.



Greg Smith, an executive director at the bank, resigned with a blistering opinion piece that accused the bank of losing its "moral fiber," putting profits ahead of customers' interests and dismissing customers as "muppets."



The decline of the bank's culture, he wrote, threatened the bank's survival after 143 years.



The stinging rebuke, "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs," appeared in The New York Times, was the talk of Wall Street on Wednesday and was widely circulated online. Smith became a trending topic on Twitter, the social network website.



AP