When New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1975, George D. Gould got a phone call at 1 a.m. from Mayor Abraham Beame, who invited the financier to a breakfast a few hours later. The meeting resulted in Mr. Gould’s appointment as one of the original board members of Municipal Assistance Corp., or MAC, which monitored the city’s spending and issued bonds to keep it solvent, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Gould briefly served as chairman of MAC in 1979. A graduate of the Phillips Academy, Yale and Harvard, Mr. Gould mixed a Wall Street career with a heavy dose of public-service jobs involving financial messes. Part of his motivation, he said, was to defend New York amid “unending abuse” from people living in other parts of the country who were eager to kick the city while it was down. That abuse “raised my competitive hackles,” he said. New York Gov. Hugh Carey, a Democrat, appointed Mr. Gould in 1976 to serve in another role, chairman of the state’s Housing Finance Agency. In 1985, the Reagan administration appointed him as an undersecretary of the Treasury. In that job, he dealt with failing savings-and-loan associations, or S&Ls, and with the aftermath of the October 1987 stock-market crash. Mr. Gould died April 26 at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 94. His role in New York’s financial crisis was educational, Mr. Gould told the New York Times in 1979: “It has made me realize how many erroneous, snap opinions I held and how unsimple the solutions are. It isn’t quite as easy as it looked when I was having a drink with a few friends and said, ‘Gee, they really ought to get with it.’”
