Everybody's favourite Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, has suffered a sharp sense of humour failure about a worker in its graphics department leading tourists on credit crunch-themed walks around Manhattan's financial district.
For a Guardian story on financial crisis tourism back in May, I reported on a tour led by Tom Comerford, who offered visitors an anecdote-heavy wander around Wall Street hotspots such as AIG's building, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor's.
Comerford was working in Goldman's document production division by evening, while running tours for a firm called The Wall Street Experience during the daytime. But he's since quit the bank after being told to choose between Goldman and his tours.
Comerford tells me that after The Guardian's coverage of his tours, he was summoned by Goldman's compliance department. The bank initially demanded whether he was using confidential material - zeroing in on an CDO document that he brandished to tourists as an example of a real, life toxic asset.
"They thought I was taking documents from the office which, to me, is ridiculous - I could go to jail for that," says Comerford, who says the document in question was actually a Deutsche Bank derivatives that had long been in the public domain.
Although he was able to satisfy Goldman that he wasn't stealing anything, Comerford was then told to choose between his job at the bank or his tour guiding activities - an ultimatum that he feels was "very unfair". After ten years, he quit his job.
"I looked at it as an acting gig - and I'd done acting gigs before while working at Goldman, without any problem. But they were very concerned at the tone of it," says Comerford. "They thought that if anybody could possibly, in any way, shape or form, interpret the tour negatively, I couldn't do it."
It's worth pointing out that Comerford's tour wasn't particularly harsh or judgemental on Wall Street - it was a whistlestop guide to how, and where, the credit crunch began. The Wall Street Experience is run by Andrew Luan, a former Deutsche Bank trader who has a relatively sympathetic view towards the "entrepreneurial" stories of successful financial institutions.
Goldman's chief spokesman, Lucas van Praag, points out that Comerford didn't work directly for the bank, but was employed through a contractor. Nevertheless, the bank confirms that it told him to choose between tour guiding or working at Goldman.
"He was told that given the nature of the tours he was giving, we'd like him not to do it," says Van Praag. "Being very deprecating about the industry while claiming to be an employee of one of the organisations within it seemed to be inconsistent."
Goldman apparently took exception to Comerford's description, which I reported, of subprime mortgage securities as "crap". Van Praag said: "Here he is, advertising himself as a Goldman employee and talking about producing subprime mortgage securities as 'crap'."
Strangely enough, though, we've heard similar sentiments expressed before at Goldman - by a young banker named Fabrice Tourre, who described his own CDOs as "monstrosities" and compared them to creations of Frankenstein. Tourre, who is at the centre of Goldman's recently settled brush with regulators for fraud, remains employed by the bank on fully paid leave.