Goldman Sachs

The Goldman Sachs Group

Company type	Public (NYSE: GS)
Industry	financial sector financial service activities, except insurance and pension funding
Founded	1869
Headquarters	New York, NY
Key people	Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman & CEO Gary Cohn, President & COO Jon Winkelried, President and COO John S. Weinberg, Vice Chairman David A. Viniar, CFO Edward C. Forst, CAO Gregory K. Palm, General Counsel Esta E. Stecher, General Counsel Kevin W. Kennedy, Head of Human Capital Management Alan M. Cohen, Global Head of Compliance
Products	Investment Banking
Revenue	US $87.968 Billion (2007)
Net income	US $1,51 Billion (02/29/08)
Total assets	861,395,000,000 United States dollar (2015)
Number of employees	34,809 (2007)
Website	www.gs.com

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., or simply Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), is one of the world's largest global investment banks. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869, and is headquartered in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City at 85 Broad Street. Goldman Sachs has offices in leading financial centers such as New York City, London, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Frankfurt, Zürich, Paris, São Paulo, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Mexico City, Singapore, Salt Lake City, Sydney, Dubai, Madrid, Milan, Calgary, Melbourne, Auckland, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Moscow, Tel-Aviv, Toronto, and Monaco.

Goldman Sachs acts as a financial advisor to some of the most important companies, largest governments, and wealthiest families in the world. It is a primary dealer in the U.S. Treasury securities market. Goldman Sachs offers its clients mergers & acquisitions advisory, provides underwriting services, engages in proprietary trading, invests in private equity deals, and also manages the wealth of affluent individuals and families.

Due to its secretive firm culture and revolving door relationship with the Federal government, Goldman has recently been referred to as Wall Street's secret society, with former Goldman employees currently heading the New York Stock Exchange, the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department, the White House staff, and even rival firms such as Merrill Lynch. Its landmark profits during the 2007 Subprime mortgage financial crisis led the New York Times to proclaim that Goldman Sachs is without peer in the world of finance.

History

Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 by German Jewish immigrant Marcus Goldman. The company made a name for itself pioneering the use of commercial paper for entrepreneurs and was invited to join the New York Stock Exchange in 1896. It was during this time that Goldman's son-in-law Samuel Sachs joined the firm which prompted the name change to Goldman Sachs.

In the early 20th Century, Goldman was a major player in establishing the Initial Public Offering market. It managed one of the largest IPO's to date, that of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1906. It also became one of the first companies to heavily recruit those with MBA degrees from leading Business Schools, a practice that still continues today.

In 1929, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end mutual fund with characteristics similar to that of a Ponzi Scheme. The fund failed as a result of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, hurting the firm's reputation for several years afterward.

In 1930, Sidney Weinberg assumed the role of Senior Partner and shifted Goldman's focus away from Trading and towards Investment Banking. It was Weinberg's actions that helped to restore some of Goldman's tarnished reputation. On the back of Weinberg, Goldman was lead advisor on the Ford Motor Company's IPO in 1956, which at the time was a major coup on Wall Street. Under Weinberg's reign the Firm also started an Investment Research division and a Municipal Bond department. It also was at this time that the firm became an early innovator in Risk Arbitrage.

Gus Levy joined the firm in the 1950s as a well known securities trader, which started a trend at Goldman where there would be two powers generally vie for supremacy, one from investment banking and one from securities trading. For most of the 1950s and 1960's, this would be Weinberg and Levy. Levy was a pioneer in block trading and the firm established this trend under his guidance. Due to Weinberg's heavy influence at the firm, it formed an Investment Banking Division in 1956 in an attempt to spread around influence and not focus it all on Weinberg.

In 1969, Levy took over as Senior Partner from Weinberg, and built Goldman's trading franchise once again. It is Levy who is credited with Goldman's famous philosophy of being "long term greedy," which implies that as long as money is made over the long term, trading losses in the short term are not to be worried about. That same year, Weinberg retired from the firm.

Another financial crisis for the firm occurred in 1970, when the Penn Central Railroad Company went bankrupt with over $80 million in commercial paper outstanding, most of it issued by Goldman Sachs. The bankruptcy was large, and the resulting lawsuits threatened the partnership capital and life of the firm. It was this bankruptcy that resulted in credit ratings being created for every issuer of commercial paper today by several credit rating services.

During the 1970s, the firm also expanded in several ways. Under the direction of Senior Partner Stanley R. Miller, it opened its first international office in London in 1970, and created a Private Wealth division along with a Fixed Income division in 1972. It also pioneered the "White Knight" strategy in 1974 during its attempts to defend Electric Storage Battery against a hostile takeover bid from International Nickel and Goldman's rival Morgan Stanley. This action would boost the firm's reputation as an investment advisor because it pledged to no longer participate in hostile takeovers.

John Weinberg (the son of Sidney Weinberg), and John C. Whitehead assumed roles of Co-Senior Partners in 1976, once again emphasizing the co-leadership at the firm. One of their most famous initiatives was the establishment of the 14 Business Principles that are still used to this day.

In the 1980s, the firm made a major move by acquiring J. Aron & Company, a commodities trading firm which merged with the Fixed Income division to become known as Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities. J. Aron was a major player in the coffee and gold markets, and the current CEO of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, joined the firm as a result of this merger. In 1985 it underwrote the public offering of the Real Estate Investment Trust that owned Rockefeller Center, then the largest REIT offering in history. In accordance with the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the firm also became largely involved in facilitating the global privatization movement by advising companies that were spinning off from their parent governments.

In 1986, the firm formed Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which manages the majority of its mutual funds and hedge funds today. In the same year, the firm also underwrote the IPO of Microsoft, advised General Electric on its acquisition of RCA and joined the London and Tokyo stock exchanges. 1986 also was the year when Goldman became the first United States bank to rank in the top 10 of Mergers and Acquisitions in the United Kingdom. During the 1980s the firm became the first bank to distribute its investment research electronically and created the first public offering of original issue deep-discount bond.

Robert Rubin and Stephen Friedman assumed the Co-Senior Partnership in 1990 and pledged to focus on globalization of the firm and strengthening the Merger & Acquisition and Trading business lines. During their reign, the firm introduced paperless trading to the New York Stock exchange and lead-managed the first-ever global debt offering by a U.S. corporation. It also launched the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) and opened a Beijing office in 1994. It was this same year that Jon Corzine assumed leadership of the firm following the departure of Rubin and Friedman. The firm joined David Rockefeller and partners in a 50-50 join ownership of Rockefeller Center during 1994, but later sold the shares to Tishman Speyer in 2000. In 1996, Goldman was lead underwriter of the Yahoo! IPO and in 1998 it was global coordinator of the NTT DoCoMo IPO. In 1999, Henry Paulson took over as Senior Partner.

One of the largest events in the firm's history was its own IPO in 1999. The decision to go public was a tough one that the partners debated for decades. In the end, Goldman decided to offer only a small portion of the company to the public, with some 48% still held by the partnership pool. 22% of the company is held by non-partner employees, and 18% is held by retired Goldman partners and two longtime investors, Sumitomo Bank Ltd. and Hawaii's Kamehameha Activities Assn (the investing arm of Kamehameha Schools). This leaves approximately 12% of the company as being held by the public. Henry Paulson became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the firm. Hull Trading Company, one of the world’s premier market-making firms, was acquired by Goldman in 1999 for $531 million.

More recently, the firm has been busy both in Investment Banking and in Trading activities. It purchased Spear, Leeds, & Kellogg, one of the largest specialist firms on the New York Stock Exchange, for $6.3 billion in September 2000. It also advised on a landmark debt offering for the Government of China and the first electronic offering for the World Bank. It merged with JBWere, the Australian investment bank and opened a full-service broker-dealer in Brazil. It expanded its investments in companies to include Burger King, McJunkin Corporation, and in January 2007, Alliance Atlantis alongside CanWest Global Communications to own sole broadcast rights to the CSI franchise. In May 2006, Henry Paulson left the firm to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Lloyd Blankfein was promoted to Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Corporate affairs

File:GoldmanSachsTower.jpg

Goldman Sachs Tower in Jersey City

As of 2006, Goldman Sachs employed 26,467 people worldwide. It reported earnings of US$9.34 billion and record earnings per share of $19.69. It was reported that the average total compensation per employee in 2006 was US$622,000. However, this number represents the arithmetic mean of total compensation and is highly skewed upwards as several hundred of the top earners command the majority of the Bonus Pools, leaving the median that most employees earn well below this number. The current Chief Executive Officer is Lloyd C. Blankfein. The company ranks #1 in Annual Net Income when compared with 86 peers in the Investment Services sector. Blankfein earned a $67.9 million bonus in his first year. He chose to receive "some" cash unlike present United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, his predecessor who chose to take his bonus entirely in company stock.

Recently Goldman Sachs has been increasingly involved in both advising and brokering deals to privatize major highways by selling them off to foreign investors. In addition to advising Indiana on the Toll Road deal, Goldman Sachs has worked with Texas governor Rick Perry's administration on privatization projects, and according to John Schmidt, the former adviser to the Chicago mayor's office, it was a Goldman Sachs representative who first pitched the city on the idea of leasing out the Skyway. Goldman Sachs has played a major role in advising states on how to structure privatization deals—even while positioning itself to invest in the toll road market.

Businesses

Goldman Sachs is divided into three core businesses.

Investment banking

Investment Banking is divided into two divisions and includes Financial Advisory (mergers and acquisitions, investitures, corporate defense activities, restructurings and spin-offs) and Underwriting (public offerings and private placements of equity, equity-related and debt instruments). Goldman Sachs is one of the leading investment banks, appearing in league tables. In mergers and acquisitions, it gained fame historically by advising clients on how to avoid hostile takeovers. Goldman Sachs, for a long time during the 1980s, was the only major investment bank with a strict policy against helping to initiate a hostile takeover, which increased Goldman's reputation immensely. This segment accounts for around 15 percent of Goldman Sachs' revenues.

Trading

Trading and Principal Investments is the largest of the three core segments, and is the company's profit center. The segment is divided into three divisions and includes Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (trading in interest rate and credit products, mortgage-backed securities and loans, currencies and commodities, structured and derivative products), Equities (trading in equities, equity-related products, equity derivatives, structured products and executing client trades in equities, options, and Futures contracts on world markets), and Principal Investments (merchant banking investments and funds). This segment consists of the revenues and profit gained from the Bank's trading activities, both on behalf of its clients (known as flow trading) and for its own account (known as proprietary trading).

Most trading done by Goldman is not speculative, but rather an attempt to profit from bid-ask spreads in the process of acting as a market maker. Around 65 percent of Goldman's revenues and profits are derived from this area. Upon its IPO, Goldman predicted that this segment would not grow as fast as its Investment Banking division and would be responsible for a shrinking proportion of earnings. The opposite has been true, however, and resulted in Lloyd Blankfein's appointment to President and Chief Operating Officer after John Thain's departure to run the NYSE and John L. Thornton's departure for an academic position in China.

Asset management and securities services

Asset Management and Securities Services is a rapidly growing business for Goldman as it gains market share. It is separated into two divisions, and includes Asset Management, which provides large institutions and very wealthy individuals with investment advisory, financial planning services, and the management of mutual funds, as well as the so-called alternative investments (hedge funds, funds of funds, infrastructure funds, real estate funds, and private equity funds). The Securities Services division provides prime brokerage, financing services, and securities lending to mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, foundations, and High net worth individuals. This segment accounts for around 19 percent of Goldman's earnings. In 2006, the Goldman Sachs Asset Management hedge fund was the largest in the United States with $29.5 billion under management. As of 2007, the fund was valued at $32.5 billion, the second-largest fund hedge fund after competitor JP Morgan's $33.1 billion fund.

In August 2007, it emerged that Goldman had to spend $2 billion to rescue its own Global Equity Opportunities hedge fund from "significant market dislocation".

GS Capital Partners

GS Capital Partners is the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs. It has invested over $17 billion in the 20 years from 1986 to 2006. One of the most prominent funds is the GS Capital Partners V fund, which comprises over $8.5 billion of equity. On April 23, 2007, Goldman closed GS Capital Partners VI with $20 billion in committed capital, $11 billion from qualified institutional and high net worth clients and $9 billion from the firm and its employees. GS Capital Partners VI is the current primary investment vehicle for Goldman Sachs to make large, privately negotiated equity investments.

Major Assets (GS Group)

• Ayco L.P. - (Financial Advisory)
• Cogentrix Energy (Energy)
• American Casino & Entertainment Properties (Casinos)
• Coffeyville Resources LLC (Refinery)
• Myers Industries, Inc. (Plastic & Rubber)
• USI Holdings Corporation (Insurance & Finance)
• East Coast Power LLC (Energy)
• Zilkha Renewable Energy (Energy)
• Queens Moat Houses (Hotels)
• Sequoia Credit Consolidation (Finance)
• Shineway Group (Meat Processing)
• Equity Inns, Inc. (Hotels)
• KarstadtQuelle property group (Retailer)
• Nursefinders Inc. (Healthcare)
• Latin Force Group, LLC (Media)

Predictions

In December 2005, four years after its report on the emerging "BRIC" economies (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), Goldman Sachs named its "Next Eleven" list of countries, using macroeconomic stability, political maturity, openness of trade and investment policies and quality of education as criteria: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam.

Corporate citizenship

Goldman Sachs has received favorable press coverage for conducting business and implementing internal policies related to reversing global climate change. According to the company web site, the Goldman Sachs Foundation has given $94 million in grants since 1999, with the goal of promoting youth education worldwide. The company also has been on Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For list since the list was launched in 1998.

In November 2007, Goldman Sachs established a donor advised fund called Goldman Sachs Gives that donates to charity funds around the world.

Other Notable Alumni

• Joshua Bolten - current White House Chief of Staff
• Erin Burnett - CNBC Host
• Jon Corzine - Governor of the State of New Jersey.
• Sacha Baron Cohen - Actor
• Michael Cohrs - Head of Global Banking at Deutsche Bank
• Emmanuel Derman - Author of My Life as a Quant and co-developer of the Black-Derman-Toy model.
• Jim Cramer - founder of TheStreet.com, best selling author, and host of Mad Money on CNBC
• Barry Horowitz - senior partner
• Henry H. Fowler - 58th United States Secretary of the Treasury (1965-1969)
• Edward Lampert- Hedge Fund Manager of ESL Investments. Brought K-Mart out of Bankruptcy in 2003.
• Ashwin Navin - President and co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc.
• Ocado - 3 Founders of first UK online supermarket were all former Fixed Income Traders at Goldman Sachs London
• George Herbert Walker IV - member of the Bush family and current managing director at Lehman Brothers
• Robert Zoellick - United States Trade Representative (2001-2005), Deputy Secretary of State (2005-2006), World Bank President.
• Mark Carney - Current Governor of the Bank of Canada
• Henry Paulson - Current United States Treasury Secretary.
• Robert Rubin - Former United States Treasury Secretary, ex-Chairman of Citigroup.
• Charlie Haas - Wrestler, who is working for World Wrestling Entertainment.

Criticism and controversy

On August 28, 2007, a former Goldman Sachs associate accused of being the mastermind behind an insider trading scheme, one that pocketed $6.7 million, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

The FBI reported on July 6, 2007, that they were investigating letters sent to newspapers nationwide that said "Goldman Sachs. Hundreds will die. We are inside. You cannot stop us." The letters were post-marked in late June from Queens, New York and were handwritten in red ink on loose leaf paper, signed by "A.Q.U.S.A.". A subsequent letter to New York Daily News claimed that the original threat was a hoax "conceived by three misguided teenagers", and pleaded for the investigation to be halted.

In 2005, the firm advised both the New York Stock Exchange and Archipelago, which owns an electronic trading platform, in merger talks. Controversy surrounded the deal as John Thain, who heads the New York Stock Exchange, was a former Goldman Sachs Executive.

Also in 2005, Goldman Sachs received criticism from civic groups and New York City politicians when they received approximately $1.6 billion in taxpayer subsidies (mostly through Liberty Bonds) from New York City and state taxpayers to finance the Firm's new headquarters near the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan in return for a commitment to keep at least 9000 employees and a major trading operation in Manhattan. It also comes with the expectation of the creation of at least 4000 new jobs by 2019.

In 1986, David Brown was convicted of passing inside information to Ivan Boesky on a takeover deal. Robert Freeman, who was a senior Partner, the Head of Risk Arbitrage, and a protégé of Robert Rubin, was also convicted of insider trading, with his own account and with the firm's.

In 2006, as a result of an SEC investigation, Eugene Plotkin, a former research analyst in the Fixed Income division of Goldman Sachs, and David Pajcin, a former employee of Goldman Sachs, were prosecuted for insider trading. The prosecution began after regulators noticed unusually high trading volume before a merger announcement and discovered that a retired seamstress in Croatia, the aunt of Pajcin, had made more than $2 million. Plotkin and Pajcin traded in at least 25 stocks within one year based on inside information obtained through these schemes. Plotkin was sentenced to 57 months in prison and was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and to forfeit up to $6.7 million, the amount of the scam's illegal profits. Pajcin, who cooperated with the government, is expected to be sentenced soon.

Exit Policy

Goldman Sachs has been known to lay off 5% of its worst-performing staff each year.

Actions in the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis

How Goldman went short of the subprime market

Two Goldman traders, Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum, are credited with bearing responsibility for the firm's large profits during America's sub-prime mortgage crisis. A flurry of stories said the pair, who are part of Goldman's structured products group in New York, made a profit of $4bn by "betting" on a collapse in the sub-prime market. They persuaded reluctant colleagues to see their point of view and talked around skeptical risk management executives . So, Goldman Sachs not only escaped the carnage but achieved a stellar quarter between June and Sept 2007 (in comparison to most of the other banks). Trading revenues at GS rose 70% from the same period in 2006, a massive $8.2 billion all told, taking the group’s net earnings to a new record for the year so far. So how did Goldman succeed where everyone else failed? The bank made no secret of its success in its Q3 report of Sept. 20th:

Net revenues in [trading] mortgages were…significantly higher, despite continued deterioration in the market environment. Significant losses on non-prime loans and securities were more than offset by gains on short mortgage positions.

Goldman Sachs was able to profit from the collapse in subprime mortgage bonds in the summer of 2007 by selling the subprime mortgage-backed market short. Sources close to the bank say Swenson, 40, and Birnbaum, 35, were hedging by building short positions to offset "long" positions elsewhere in the bank. According to one source:

Insiders stress that instructions to build up hedge positions in sub-prime mortgages came from the highest echelons of Goldman Sachs - chief financial officer David Viniar and chief executive Lloyd Blankfein were engaged and involved and, as an article in The Guardian points out:

Goldman can't be blamed for the retail lenders who pushed unaffordable mortgages on to working-class Americans who couldn't afford the repayments. But the firm is part of a Wall Street culture of trading mortgage loans through debt structures of such a Byzantine nature that nobody knows where the risk finally lies..

Some people also believe that Goldman wasn't quite as careful with its clients' money as it was with its own - its flagship Global Alpha hedge fund tumbled 37% in the global credit crunch. As the individual investments of hedge funds and investment banks are not made public, no one can know exactly what is being bought long and sold short in any of these companies, however.

Goldman Sach's Alternative Mortgage Products

In 2006, Goldman Sachs’ mortgage-bond division - Alternative Mortgage Products (known as GSAMP for short) - issued 83 home-loan-backed bonds, valued at $44.5 billion. In the subprime sector, it grew its business by 59% from 2005, offloading some $12.9 billion on to fund managers.

According to Inside Mortgage Finance, that made GSAMP the 15th biggest issuer of subprime-backed bonds in 2006. According to the website ABAlert.com (Asset-backed Alert), Goldman Sachs was one of the top 10 sellers of Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO's) and may have sold about $100 billion in CMO's over the last two and a half years.

But, by the start of the third quarter this year, those securities were being downgraded by the credit ratings agencies faster than any other subprime lender. According to a Reuters report, Citigroup's research (22nd June, 2007), stated “portions of Goldman’s GSAMP-issued bonds, which include subprime loans from a variety of lenders, have been downgraded a combined 69 times by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service in the year through June 15. Sixty of the GSAMP downgrades refer to classes from 2006 bonds,” Citigroup added, and Allan Sloane in The Washington Post stated that one of Goldman’s 2006 crop - the GSAMP Trust 2006- S3 - may actually be “the worst deal…floated by a top-tier firm.” One in every six of the 8,274 mortgages bundled together in GSAMP Trust 2006-S3 was already in default 18 months later. Whoever bought the S3 bonds will have either taken a 100% loss, or are waiting to sell it on at a heavy discount.

So, Goldman earned revenue by selling its products twice: first as an asset and then as a short, a common investment practice that is not illegal.

Works about Goldman Sachs

• Vault (2006). Vault employer profile. Goldman Sachs. New York: Vault, Inc. ISBN 1-581-31469-8.
• WetFeet (2004). The Goldman Sachs Group. San Francisco, CA: WetFeet. ISBN 1-582-07450-X.
• Endlich, Lisa (1999). Goldman Sachs: The Culture Of Success. New York: A.A. Knopf. ISBN 0-679-45080-7.
• Lindskoog, Nils (1998). Long-term Greedy: The Triumph of Goldman Sachs. Appleton, WI: McCrossen Pub. ISBN 0-965-21533-4.

External links

• Goldman Sachs website
• Goldman Sachs Audio and Video