The Great Muppet Hunt has concluded at Goldman Sachs.
Fox Business correspondent Charlie Gasparino, citing "people close to Goldman," reports that, after an extensive internal investigation of companywide emails, Goldman has concluded that 98 percent of the "Muppet" references were about a Muppet movie.
"Sources at Goldman also say the malicious Muppet use in emails involves name-calling among colleagues," Gasparino said on Fox Business on Wednesday. "Apparently at Goldman they call each other Muppet ... The firm finds no evidence so far to substantiate [Greg] Smith’s claims that people were talking about clients.”
Goldman's Muppet hunt started in late March, according to Reuters, one week after a former Goldman Sachs vice president, Greg Smith, penned an explosive op-ed in The New York Times accusing the firm of fostering a "toxic and destructive" environment and alleging that he had seen "five different managing directors refer to their own clients as 'muppets,' sometimes over internal e-mail."
A source close to Goldman Sachs told The Huffington Post that the firm is "constantly surveilling company email and at times conducts specific searches."
The source declined to comment on the specific Muppet-related email search that Gasparino mentioned. The source also declined to answer questions about how many hours this reported email dragnet might have taken or how much manpower was devoted to it.