Goldman op-ed sparks controversy

>>> anger and frustration over wall street and the government bailout of wall street sparked two mini revolutions in the last few years. in this week, more fuel on the fire when departing goldman sachs executive greg smith wrote a "new york times" op-ed saying, "it makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off." reaction to the op-ed continue today landing on the front page of the "new york times." joining me now to discuss the impact if any of this op-ed is anchor of "way too early" and " morning joe " is willie geist . becky quick , i want to start with you. it's nice to have you here.

>> great to see you in person.

>> when i read that thing, i was like, okay, i know there's an initial new york reaction, wow, what's going on inside goldman ? and i saw it as, boy, this is just confirming everything the public thought about wall street . and why they were so angry and throw in the fact that goldman and the government are so interconnected so it makes the tea party mad. it just to me throws just a lot of fuel on this fire.

>> i would agree with you. it throws a lot of fuel on the fire, gives conspiracy theorists something to really kind of go back to once again. but i -- i think it's been overplayed and i think it's unfortunate that this is going to get out there in this way. we can talk with these guys that little bit more about that too. i agree it feeds right into that.

>> is there something to this? is goldman --

>> here's my concern about it. it sounds like a disgruntled employee. and i know that's the wall street spin on the whole thing. we had a discussion about it around the table this morning and steve liesman brought up this point. i would feel differently if this was a thing leaked out to a reporter at the time who did a lot of confirming and finding both sides of the story and reporting it out. i don't know a lot about this gentleman, i don't know what happened there, but taking it just as a letter itself it seems to me like a disgruntled employee.

>> almost like a -- how you feel about wall street . a ha or if you're a defender of wall street , disgruntled.

>> well, i don't think you'll find many defenders of wall street outside new york city . this is a wall street town. but i think that it does feed into the kind of larger opinion about what's happening on wall street and this kind of grind between main street and wall street and that people want to demonize wall street and they want to be validated in their opinions that they are taking advantage of them. and this kind of feeds into -- it feeds into that kind of rationale.

>> if the headline here, though, chuck is wall street is greedy, that's not much of a headline, is it? goldman sachs or any other wall street firm is not running a charity or civic organization. they're in the business of making money . the details might be unpleasant to a lot of people, but it shouldn't come as news to people that there's greed on wall street .

>> greed is growth if everybody is winning, that's one thing, becky.

>> sure.

>> what this felt like was, you know, all right. let's take this. so you had the fed who kept interest rates artificially low because they didn't want a recession to happen. people borrowed money, there's so much loan out there, and all of a sudden goldman took all this risk and said, hey, let's say money off this. a and all of a sudden it blew up in everybody's face and all the access to goldman has, we can go down the line, it's bipartisan when it comes to goldman 's ties. and look what happened.

>> you know, you could say that, and i -- to charles' point to about this is how the rest of the country is going to read this. it's probably true and it's probably unfortunate because they're not going to look at the actual details. and why was this a letter to the editor instead of a fully reported piece that gives you both sides of the story? and i hate to say this is just a disgruntled employee because i wish i could tell you about what was happening inside.

>> on the campaign trail yesterday, you know what i found fascinating? both santorum and newt gingrich , not mitt romney -- not barack obama , both santorum and newt gingrich yesterday, charles, attacked mitt romney for raising money on wall street . it was almost like they didn't cite the op-ed, but wall street is a dirty word right now with both bases of the party.

>> absolutely. and you can never go wrong by bashing wall street . and you can never go wrong about bashing new york in that sense. everybody comes here to raise money , but wall street , the fact that people are really, really, really rich in this town that can put, you know, make mitt romney seem like a poor person, that is a real thing, and you can always go to that if you need to go to that.

>> and it adds to the whole out of touch aspect and it's been a contention of mine that maybe we in the media never did a good enough job at understanding the great recession because washington and new york didn't get hit as hard.

>> and mitt romney 's here right now as we speak raising money in new york city . it was interesting to hear him say yesterday an interview with fox news when he was asked about all these perceived gaffes he's made talking about the owners of nascar and the nfl. and he looked at megan kel and said, look, i've made a lot of money in my life, i'm a rich guy, there's nothing i can do