The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 59 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Rachleff: Wealthfront software outperforms Goldman Sachs' $15M accounts for $500
“So basically what we're trying to do is take the financial services that are delivered to the very wealthy through people called private wealth managers, automate those services and software so we can deliver it for account minimums of as low as 500 dollars, a…”
Blankfein: Robinhood incorrectly claimed to offer government-insured accounts early on
“I looked at, you know, Robin Hood, great company. But early on, you know, they declared a kind of they declared that they had government-insured accounts that weren't government-insured. They had some slip-ups and a lot of apologies get made. You could do that…”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs fully hedged its 2008 AIG exposure with collateral agreements
“We were fully hedged because we had bought credit protection. Right. But we also had a collab. So we go, we, a single A credit, got a collateral agreement with AIG AAA.”
Blankfein: Managing risk mostly means persuading hesitant employees to take more risk
“But, you know, we have a lot of risk takers. And I would say that the biggest challenge for management is the risk management side, which is really getting people to refrain from risk. Which is about a third of the time when you're in that business, and by the…”
Goldman Sachs should have prevented KKR's rise in private equity
“There was no reason, really, that a KKR or a Forsman Little that were the big players back then should ever have existed. Your old firm Goldman should have beaten them.”
Solomon: Goldman Sachs would resemble Lazard without 1999 IPO
“If the firm hadn't gone public in 1999, it would have missed kind of the global expansion of capital markets and probably would look more like, not to pick on anybody, but just to pick any more like Wazard. Today than like Goldman Sachs.”
Goldman Sachs didn't predict the 2008 crisis, they just hedged their risk
“We didn't know that the financial crisis was coming. Of course, you know, we got in the press and elsewhere accused of all kinds of crazy things. Like they were the only ones who hedged so they must have known it was coming. We were just predictors of the pres…”
Blankfein: Crisis defense is the worst time to build public trust
“And when you're being defensive and people are trying to kill you, it's not the best time to try to make friends with the public.”
Blankfein: Risk meetings should prioritize concrete action plans over debating probabilities
“And when you go around the table for those meetings, you're not so much interested in what people think about the future, where things will go. You just want to know, forget about what you think the likelihood, improbability of something happening is. What wil…”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs partnership grants a baseline presumption of intelligence
“Saying that, you know, look, I was a partner at Goldman. I'm not saying this is exclusive to Goldman. But saying your partner, at least people will, the presumption has shifted that you're not a dummy unless you prove you're a dummy, as opposed to other people…”
Blankfein: Never tell reporting employees 'I already know' to prevent self-censorship
“One thing I never did, if somebody was calling to tell me something that was bothering them, that they saw an opportunity or a challenge, I never said I already know about it. Because I never wanted anybody to self-censor later.”
Blankfein: Off-balance-sheet vehicles lower unit revenue but boost ROE and P/E
“We shifted a lot of that to off-balance sheet vehicles, and by the way, means you have to do more of it. Because instead of earning a hundred-cent dollars, you're earning twenty-cent dollars with lower risk, and a higher P.E., and a higher R.R. Return on equit…”
Blankfein: Staying understated creates severe risks for influential market players
“I think there's no, you know, being modest and understated carries a lot of disadvantages. And I think you have to explain the role you Are in the market, so that there's some appreciation of what you do.”
Blankfein: Mark-to-market accounting serves as a critical risk management early warning system
“Mark-to-market is not just a P&L system, it's a risk management system. Because we, that was our early warning that something was amiss here.”
Blankfein: The repeal of Glass-Steagall forced Goldman Sachs to go public
“So we had to, you know, if J.P. Morgan was gonna become an advisor, we had to become a good lender and a good financier. So it meant that we had to have a bigger balance sheet. Couldn't run that on impermanent capital of a partnership. And so we had to go publ…”
Solomon: Goldman Sachs balance sheet must reach $3.5T when JPMorgan hits $6T
“At the moment, JP Morgan has a four and a half trillion dollar balance sheet. When JP Morgan's six, we're gonna have to be at least three and a half. You know, at least three and a half.”
Levie: Goldman Sachs uses AI to draft S-1s in minutes
“David Solomon at Goldman Sachs, Has given this anecdote of they can write now an SEC filing or an S one for an IPO in like a few minutes that used to take a number of analysts, you know, a few days.”
Goldman Sachs sees 10% to 40% AI developer productivity gains
“And we're seeing the developer productivity go up, you know, can be anywhere from 10 to 40%, depending on the developer, depending on the use case, which is massive, even if it stays at 10%.”
Argenti: Regulatory controls ultimately accelerate long-term innovation velocity
“Regulation and other controls are actually very important for sustained speed of innovation. So you might be slow at the beginning, but then eventually you'll gain velocity.”
Goldman delivered 47 Lehman closeout claims within an hour of bankruptcy
“We had our courier show up, At Lehman's headquarters within an hour of its filing bankruptcy protection for the 47 entities, and we had 47 sheets of paper with our closeout claim against each of those entities rolled up from wide across all the businesses, and…”
Shum: Goldman Sachs's Apple Card system likely contains AI bias
“You probably would, you know, agree with me that very likely there's some kind of AI buyers in the machine learning system they have built.”
Cohen: Companies with strong distribution should acquire secondary market players
“But if you're a big company, and you have access to, for example, clients and distribution, maybe the party that's a number two is a number two, because they don't have access to that. And so then they have the same product, but they don't have access. So then…”
Cohen: Strategy and M&A belong within the same team
“I think about it as the way that we think about it is that we want strategy and MNA to be in the same place. So instead of having a group of people that goes off and does strategy and a group of people that goes off and does MNA, and by the way, incentivizing …”
Cohen: Fear of losing targets to rivals drives maximum acquisition prices
“When I was on the sell side, my favorite thing was to find the buyer who not only wanted to win, but was afraid to lose. When you had the guy or the gal who thought that their arch, their biggest rival was going to buy something, that was how you actually got …”
Cohen: Isolating innovation projects risks alienating employees driving core daily operations
“You could get to a place where you actually distract the whole organization because in an organization of tens of thousands of people, there's a lot of people every day who just have to be with their clients, execute, and they need to have fun doing that and n…”
Goldman Sachs estimated Bitcoin could save consumers $200 billion
“For example, even as like 12 months ago, even 18 months ago, people were calling Bitcoin an imaginary currency for crazy people on the internet. And now Goldman Sachs is saying it can save people two hundred billion dollars.”
Blankfein: J. Aron sold to Goldman Sachs at peak market valuation
“And of course, the savvy, streety guys at Jay Aaron extrapolated the value of the firm at the peaky, peaky part of its thing and sold itself to Goldman.”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs gained a massive advantage from early risk system investments
“Our risk systems, by the way, we had a huge technological advantage because of what we invested in Early on.”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs rejected me before acquiring my firm, J. Aron
“I interviewed A lot, and being in New York, what do you go into when you're done? Whether you go to, you either become a consultant or, you know, go to Wall Street. I said, I'll go to Wall Street. And, you know, give a, you know, there I will. I will bestow my…”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs's first S&P cash-and-carry trade was a record $100 million
“And the first order that came in, and this was like in, back when this was real money, was for a hundred million dollars worth of this. That was by far the biggest trade ever.”
Blankfein: Subordinating short-term ego to a firm yields greater long-term power
“We just said that if you subordinate it in the short term or during, at key times, in favor of a platform, you can exploit that platform, again, professionally, because the firm would have much more heft and power and authority.”
Solomon: Goldman Sachs holds $500B in total deposits, funding 40% of firm
“We've got, you participated in this, a very excellent digital deposit platform that now has, you know, over two hundred billion dollars of deposits, and we've also, we have about five hundred billion dollars of total deposits. 15 years ago, we had zero. So we …”
Horowitz: Goldman and Sachs families severed ties over World War I
“Also, Goldman stopped speaking to Sachs, like, forever. Like, they got very mad at each other over, it was at Sachs who supported Germany in World War I, so.”
Argenti: AI will accelerate real-time financial operations and complex modeling
“You know, you need to go through front to back extremely quickly that, and so all that, I think this shift towards more of a real time business is something that AI definitely will accelerate the ability to have very complex models of the world and of the econ…”
Goldman Sachs selected 15 to 19 AI use cases for pilots
“So we have set up you know, a working group or a committee that kind of reviews all the ideas when we selected out of hundreds idea of ideas, we've selected about 15 or 19 actually at this point that we're kind of, you know, at different phases of piloting.”
Argenti: Goldman Sachs looks outside for software before building internally
“So at the very beginning, we kind of introduced our digital strategy tenants if you remember, and one of them was look outside first before you build.”
Cohen: Red team exercises prevent large companies from making M&A mistakes
“And if you stop and actually have a group of really smart people internally and maybe with your external advisor say, we're going to show up for one day, for two hours, and we're going to make the case on the other side, and in the process of making that case,…”
Cohen: Goldman Sachs bans customization of off-the-shelf software
“So we have a rule now against doing that. So, so I hope for that makes people feel better. We're going to stop the tweaking of the, of stuff that's generally available off the shelf.”
Cohen: Competing internal builds against external software prevents insular development
“If you're competing the own, your own internal projects with either buy and by buy, I mean, just buy the product from a software or other perspective, or buy meaning by the company. If you're doing that in a relatively systematic way, I think you're avoiding s…”
Cohen: Operating divisions should be responsible for their own strategy
“The other thing we decided, and this was advice I got, I think I still agree with it, is that divisions Should be responsible for their own strategy.”
Cohen: Treat internal corporate organizations as customers to protect innovation
“So the way that we like to think about it is we like, in places where we're worried about that, we try them to treat the internal organization like a customer.”
Cohen: Combining build and buy strategies forces enterprises to engage specialized startups
“The second thing is if you have a perspective around it's not buy versus buyer build, it's both, then you are going to force yourself to deal with individual vendors in a lot of cases because you are looking for very specific solutions. Of course, like every b…”
Cohen: Underfunded female founders represent a prime commercial investment opportunity
“We felt that women were not getting the capital that they needed or deserved, and that it really meant that they were a good investment. So there's a lot of capital out there, which many people know, but in a place that's being under invested, we thought there…”
Cohen: Protecting core-business internal startups is harder than isolated ventures
“But another thing that we're focused on that we've talked about is cash management and payments. Well, this gets to the very core of what we do every day. It's the, it's our core investment banking clients. It's core to our internal payment functions. And so, …”
Cohen: Acquired companies need internal 'bat phone' contacts during integration
“Taking a group of people internally who have experience with M&A, who know the internal business, who know how to get things done from your internal engineering team, from compliance, Having an internal team and pairing them with the company, I think is really…”
Cohen: Enterprise acquisition synergies fail when buyer personas differ
“The second thing is, you know what you bought, and what I mean by know what you bought, that's particularly important in the enterprise space, where it's more confusing, right? So, you're a company, you sell a lot to a certain sector, and then you buy another …”
Cohen: Acquiring for product and tech justifies paying for market leaders
“But when you're going after product and technology, my hunch is that the paying for the number one makes sense.”
Cohen: Regulated corporations fail when building non-core technology internally
“I think companies get in trouble when they try to do things That should happen externally, internally. And what I mean by that is I think there are certain types of talent that have no desire to work inside an organization that has 40,000 people, that's highly…”