Why Saying “I'm Sorry” Isn't Good Enough: The Ethics of Corporate ...

Ethics Corporate Apologies
was planning to offer the same lower cost pricing in the US in the near future (Yarrow,
2010).
We may usefully contrast Hastings’ apology and its promise to rectify matters in a very
specific fashion, on the one hand, with the apology attempted by Lloyd Blankfein, the
CEO of Goldman Sachs, after the near meltdown of the financial sector. Blankfein
stumbled about when offering a vague apology for his firms’ involvement in “things”:
“There’s also people who feel—and who are right—that there’s some meaningful things
where we may have—not may have, certainly our industry is responsible for things. And
we’re a leader in our industry, and we participated in things that were clearly wrong, and
we have reasons to regret and apologize for” (quoted in Gordon, 2009, 1). When pressed,
Blankfein would not admit any specific wrongdoing connected with Goldman Sachs’
sales or even with some of the practices of the mortgage industry as a whole. Goldman
had packaged and sold more than $40-billion worth of bonds backed by sub-prime
mortgages in 2006 and 2007. At the same time, Goldman was laying huge bets that the
housing market would experience a sharp downturn, thereby dramatically reducing the
value of these same bonds (Morgenstern et al, 2009). Goldman did not disclose these bets
to investors. Blankfein refused to admit that analysts at Goldman had ever doubted the
value of these bonds, responding that Goldman was simply “in the world of risk
management, not in the world of guessing where things were going” (Morgenstern et al,
2009, 24). This answer would be a lot more believable if there were any evidence that
Goldman was also buying large amounts of mortgage-backed securities for its own
portfolios at the same time as it was offloading billions of dollars’ worth of these
securities onto unwary investors. No such evidence has emerged. Equally troubling,
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