GUEST COMMENT: Why I am still very happy to have Goldman on my CV

I am one of tens of thousands of people worldwide to have the name of the 'vampire squid' on my CV. I joined the firm out of university, worked as an analyst for a few years, and moved to the buy side, where I intend to stay. I'm certain that working at a lesser bank would have made this move harder, particularly since several of the firm's partners are ex-Goldman. It's a club I'm proud to be part of.

So does the SEC's case make me ashamed to have the Goldman name on my CV? Not so much..

The CDO business is a discrete part of Goldman Sachs; I worked in M&A, which bears no relation to it. This may mean little or nothing to the average member of the general public who's unable or unwilling to distinguish between a commercial bank and an investment bank, but it's material to anyone who knows anything about the industry. And frankly, those are the people whose opinions I really care about.

Equally, who's to say other banks don't have skeletons of their own in the closet? The case against Goldman, which appears to have been politically motivated, could easily be followed by similar ones against Merrill Lynch, UBS or Deutsche Bank. There are two kinds of investment banks - ones that were on the right right of the credit crunch trade and the rest.

The truth is that once you've made the ideological call to work in investment banking, all organisations are part of the same club. Your granny then needs to decide whether you're the devil incarnate or the same person she's always loved and sees three times a year - it won't make much difference to her whether you work at Goldman, Morgan Stanley, or Rabobank.

However, away from your granny and in the City itself, where you work does matter. Within the club, there's a hierarchy, and Goldman has always been at the top. If you're going to be an investment banker, you might as well have worked for the best.

Would anything change my mind? Are there situations in which the Goldman Sachs name would be quietly erased from my past? Maybe. I'm not ruling it out. There have been gaffes, particularly the Lloyd Blankfein Times interview one in which he claimed to be doing God's work.

The problem with Goldman is that having set itself up as the best, it will always be the first to be knocked down. That may be so. But it doesn't mean that it's not the best. This is still the case, for the moment at least. Having Goldman on my CV is a rich man's problem.