A growing China is good for everybody as creation of wealth “ultimately trickles across the world”, Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein has said.
“If China grows its GDP, and the Chinese get richer, of course it’s a wonderful thing for China. But what will they do with their riches,” he said.
“For some percentage of their riches they’ll buy goods and services — they’ll buy iPhones, goods and services that the United States produces, and that’ll be good for us, too,” Blankfein said at the Charlie Rose show.
“So whether — whenever you add a resource into the world, a commodity, whether it’s energy or wealth, it’s good for the person who really acquires it, but ultimately it trickles across the world and is good for everybody,” he said in response to a question.
Goldman Sachs CEO argued that when wealth gets created, the financial system in this country and globally does two things.
“It helps to generate the wealth, and it serves to distribute it. And so wealth created anywhere in the world gets distributed because people — how to people manifest the benefits of wealth? They buy things,” he said.
“Some of the things they’ll buy from us. If they’re not buying enough from us, maybe it’s because they have restrictive policies and we have to fight that or maybe it’s because we’re not competitive and we don’t make things that they want, in which case we have to blame ourselves,” he said.
CEO of Goldman Sachs for the last 10 years said the world has changed a lot in these years.
“And as the world has developed and grown in the growth markets, we’ve grown with it. Fifteen years ago the CEO of Goldman Sachs didn’t have to go to China two or three times a year or India every year or Brazil or some of these countries,” he said.
“As these countries have grown around the world a lot of what we do — I started the conversation by saying that a lot of what we do — the success that we would have correlates with growth. And so naturally we chase growth around the world,” Blankfein said.