George D. Gould, a Wall Street financier who was a calm figure in the frenzied fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s in New York and an original member of the state agency created to borrow on behalf of a near-bankrupt New York City , died on April 26 at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Julie Frist.
Mr. Gould was home one day in 1975 when New York City Mayor Abraham D. Beam called him after midnight to invite him to breakfast that morning. There, Mr. Gould was recruited to serve on the board of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which rushed New Yorkers to raise money and avert bankruptcy.
Big MAC, as it became known, was created after banks and other financial institutions refused to buy more municipal and short-term bonds because, they said, the market was saturated and the city’s ability to repay its debts was precarious. become.
But for decades, these institutions had reaped hefty fees from the city and were complicit in what amounted to the tax ploys that led to the crisis.
Mr. Gould was a member of the company for four years from 1975. He became its chairman in January 1979, when Felix G. Rohatyn resigned to return to Lazard Freres & Company, the investment banking and consulting firm.
But Mr. Gould stepped down as chairman — a part-time, unpaid post — in June, in part because he was annoyed that Governor Hugh L. Carey, who appointed him, still relied primarily on Mr. Rohatyn for advice on New York’s financial recovery. York. Mr Carey asked Mr Rohatyn to return as Chairman after Mr Gould stepped down.
“As a board member,” Eugene J. Keilin, former MAC president and chairman, said in an email, “George was sort of a senior statesman even then, knowledgeable about the bond markets, and a Republican when we needed him. credibility with the Rockefeller Republicans, who were not extinct at the time.”
It took bipartisan support in the state legislature and Congress to obtain federal loan guarantees and other aid to help the city overcome the crisis.
Stephen Berger, who served as executive director of the Emergency Financial Control Board during the city’s fiscal crisis, described Mr Gould in an email as “a stabilizing force, balanced, smart and calm.”
At a time when several New York government agencies were under tax pressure, Mr. Gould also, at various times, chaired the state’s Housing Finance Agency, the Medical Care Facility Finance Agency, the Mortgage Agency, the Project Finance Agency and the State Dormitory Authority.
In 1985 he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance by Secretary of the Treasury James A. Baker III, a position Mr Gould held until 1988 overseeing domestic banking regulations. He received the Alexander Hamilton Award, the highest award from the Treasury Department.
When he became MAC chairman, he reflected on the difference between worrying about government shortcomings from the outside and how to fix them from within.
“It made me realize how many erroneous, quick opinions I had and how illogical the solutions are,” Mr. Gould told The New York Times in 1979. isn’t as easy as it seemed when I had a drink with some friends and said, ‘Gosh, they should really go through with it.’”
Reviewing the fiscal crisis and its role in it, he added: “The scale of the problem was bigger than we thought, but so was the scale of the resources. What we found were people who acted very responsibly because of enlightened self-interest.”
After serving in the Treasury Department, Mr. Gould chaired the Finance and Governance Committee of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, a publicly traded, government-sponsored company known as Freddie Mac.
George Sumner Bradford Dana Gould was born on May 22, 1927 in Boston. He was named Sumner after Charles Sumner, the abolitionist United States Senator from Massachusetts, who was his mother’s great-uncle. Bradford represented his ancestral connection to a family that traced its New England roots to 1635.
His father, Ernest Wellington Gould, was a private investor. His mother, Lillian Dana (Sumner) Gould, died when he was 5, and he was raised primarily by an aunt.
After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he served in the Army from 1945 to 1947 and was discharged as a second lieutenant. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1951 and a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1955.
He spent his entire corporate career on Wall Street, serving as chairman of the board of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Corporation from 1961 to 1976. He became chairman of the Madison Fund, an investment firm, in 1977 and later a general partner in Wertheim & Company.
In addition to his stepdaughter, he is survived by his wife, Darcy Mead Gould; his son, George Gould, from his marriage to Julie (Echols) Gould, who died in 1983; his stepsons, William Bancroft, Montgomery Bancroft, and Michael T. Damgard; two grandchildren; and nine step-grandchildren.
