Last week, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told the House Finance Services Committee, like the rest of the banking leaders on the panel, that everything was going great. This came a little less than a month after Bloomberg reported that Goldman Sachs was laying off 65 investment banking jobs in New York City. By most accounts, Sachs always lays off around 5 percent of its workforce to start the year and hire new people. That’s one way to force people out of “job lock.”
On Monday, reports of Goldman Sachs’s annual review came out, showing the banking finance giant didn’t hit the marks analysts had expected. In fact, CNN reported that the results meant a 20 percent reduction in the “bonus pool” that Goldman Sachs has for employees every year. Don’t worry, I suspect that just means more tightening of the belt below the top executives offices. In total, Goldman Sachs reported revenues of $8.81 billion, a 13 percent drop from the $8.9 billion projected. Including the 20 percent drop in bonus money, Sachs had made new filings, dated to 2/19/19, with New York’s Department of Labor, saying that they would be laying off 98 workers.
According to Reuters, Goldman Sachs said that “economic” reasons was the cause of the layoffs. You can sort of say just about anything has an “economic” reason, so there isn’t much to go on. In the company’s release on Monday, Solomon said “We are pleased with our performance in the first quarter, especially in the context of a muted start to the year,” blaming the slow start predominantly on Trump’s government shutdown.