Sneak Peeks Into New Book on Goldman Sachs

The book by Greg Smith, a former employee of Goldman Sachs, isn't scheduled to be released until Monday. But some details are already coming to light.

For instance, Mr. Smith says that last year Goldman encouraged clients to buy and sell stock options on major European banks like BNP Paribas and UniCredit, according to reports in Politico and Bloomberg News. Those banks were beset by the Continent's debt crisis at the time.

“We must have changed our view on each of these institutions from positive to negative back to positive ten times,” the former employee writes in the book, according to those reports. “I remember thinking, ‘How can we be doing this with a straight face? No thinking client could believe that conditions on the ground could change that frequently.”

The first chapter of Mr. Smith's book, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story,” was described by DealBook's Susanne Craig earlier this week. That chapter didn't offer a clear sense of what negative details the other pages might contain. An anecdote in the chapter about a Cheddar cheese sandwich prompted some joking online.

The rest of the book “doesn't appear to contain any blockbuster revelations about Goldman's business practices that could get the firm in trouble with regulators,” Politico says. “The stories of hard partying likely will not surprise many.”

Politico says Mr. Smith describes a colleague's bachelor party in Las Vegas, where there was drinking and gambling and a scene with a topless woman. Mr. Smith is also said to talk about his compensation. “By any measure, I should have felt exceptionally lucky and grateful,” he says, according to the reports. “But by the warped logic of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, I was being [taken advantage of].”

The book apparently elaborates on claims Mr. Smith made in his initial op-ed article in The New York Times, in which he said Goldman employees referred d erisively to clients as “muppets.”

But Goldman has challenged Mr. Smith's portrayal of the firm.

“We take any issues raised by our employees seriously,” Andrew Williams, a Goldman spokesman, said in an e-mail. “In this case, we conducted a detailed review of Mr. Smith's claims, found no evidence to support them, and found nothing to suggest that he raised these issues before he was already heading out the door.”

Goldman's chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, told CNBC last week that he was “not looking forward to the hoopla” around the book.