Ken Griffin of Citadel, like the founders of two other leading hedge funds, took home more than $2 billion. The veteran hedge fund manager George Soros made $2.9 billion. Yet Lloyd Blankfein is far from being the financial world's highest earner. The bank's total assets for the first time passed the $1 trillion mark.
That same year, Goldman Sachs's net revenues of $46 billion exceeded the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of more than a hundred countries, including Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala Angola, Syria and Tunisia. In 2007 he received $68.5 million in salary, bonus and stock awards, an increase of 25 per cent on the previous year, and roughly two thousand times more than Joe Public earned. Now compare Mr Average's situation with that of Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. Allowing for inflation, the income of the median household in the United States has in fact scarcely changed since 1990, increasing by just 7 per cent in eighteen years. So in real terms Mr Average actually became just 0.9 per cent better off. But the cost of living rose by 4.1 per cent. Last year (2007) the income of the average American (just under $34,000) went up by at most 5 per cent. But what exactly is money? Is it a mountain of silver, as the Spanish conquistadors thought? Or will mere clay tablets and printed paper suffice? How did we come to live in a world where most money is invisible, little more than numbers on a computer screen? Where did money come from? And where did it all go? To generals, it is the sinews of war to revolutionaries, the shackles of labour. To Christians, the love of it is the root of all evil. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the Worldīread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: call it what you like, money matters.
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