Goldman Sachs has lost its swagger. The market value of the venerable 154-year-old investment bank, at $121bn, is now $42bn less than its longtime arch-rival Morgan Stanley. It used to be that Goldman was the more valuable bank for many years.
Likewise, it used to be that the pay of Goldman’s chief executive was the gold standard on Wall Street. But in 2022, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, James Gorman, was paid $31.5mn for his work, down 10 per cent from the year before, while Goldman’s CEO, David Solomon, received $25mn, down 29 per cent.
Then there are reports of a morale problem at the firm, which I guess is to be expected in the wake of Solomon’s recent decision to fire 3,200 employees, roughly 6 per cent of its global workforce of nearly 49,000, and of his recent confession that the bank’s strategic focus on the Main Street consumer and other more mundane commercial banking products has pretty much flopped.