The former CEO of Goldman Sachs is predicting the Iran war won’t last long.
Lloyd Blankfein, who helmed the famed investment bank from 2006 to 2018, said in a CNBC interview published Tuesday the pressure created by the conflict may be enough to end it soon.
“It’s so impossible to live with, and it’s bad for everyone—for the U.S., for our allies—and … the ones who are worse affected by it are our enemies,” said Blankfein.
Blankfein is best known for navigating Goldman through the 2008 financial crisis and helping it become one of the world’s largest investment banks by revenue, but as CEO he mostly shied away from commenting on geopolitics, unlike counterpart Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan. Yet Blankfein has spoken candidly on the issue of the Iran war and other subjects recently as he promotes his memoir, Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs, published earlier this month.
In the CNBC interview Blankfein also said resistance to the war is not limited to the U.S. and is taking place around the world.
“The effect of it is so severe that all the countries that surround the Gulf and everybody else in the world are—this is going to be the unifying factor for the world,” he added.
Blankfein’s comments come as the Iran conflict escalated over the weekend. The U.S. and Israel have increased their bombing campaign on Iran, but Israel has also targeted Lebanon, as they look to strike the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Meanwhile, Iran has targeted U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar in retaliation. In an act of defiance, Iran also named Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader to replace his father, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike.
President Donald Trump, for his part, said in a press conference Monday the war “will be over very soon,” but followed it up by saying the U.S. would “go further.” While Trump’s comments pushed stocks up on Tuesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in a joint press conference with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the U.S. “will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.”
The Iran war already sent oil prices skyrocketing to as high as $117 a barrel Monday before retreating on comments from Trump. Average gas prices rose to $3.53 as of Tuesday from $2.93 per gallon on Feb. 21—a 20.4% jump in 17 days, according to AAA.
Blankfein’s unusually candid comments on Iran mark a departure from his buttoned-up style as CEO of one of the most prestigious investment banks in the world. His 12-year tenure as Goldman’s CEO spanned multiple conflicts abroad, including the Iraq War and Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Crimean Peninsula, though he rarely commented publicly on such events.
Yet in an interview last week, Blankfein spoke at length about his belief that geopolitical events like the Iran war generally don’t affect markets too much as long as they are short-lived. While he said he doesn’t believe the Iran war will become a long-term conflict, if it did, the effects may be more pronounced.
“I suppose if they close the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices stayed up, that would feed into inflation, and that would create other kinds of dislocation,” he told PBS News Hour.
The Strait of Hormuz, bordering Iran to the south, is a critical route that enables an estimated 20% of global liquefied natural gas and gas shipments through the Persian Gulf. Experts have said the closing of this route would amount to an oil shock greater than that of the 1970s in which gas prices surged by 40% and long lines at the pump were the norm.
Still, Blankfein in his interview with PBS played down the potential of a broader escalation in the conflict, saying: “We’re not dealing in a part of the world that’s a really big part of the global economy other than the fact that it sources a lot of energy.”
