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 78 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
Grantham: Goldman and JPMorgan will never tell clients to exit overpriced markets
“You will never hit a Goldman Sachs or a JP Morgan Tell you to get out of the market because it's ludicrously overpriced. Everybody knows today it's ludicrously overpriced, but no one can tell you, and they never will.”
Roth: Goldman Sachs experiences tension between rep and firm goals
“This is not to pick on Goldman. They are a great firm. We would not be here if it weren't for them, but that firm is where there's tension. Between the goals of the individual rep and the firm's goals.”
Playing naive effectively deters unethical propositions at work, Auby advises
“Naivete is a great tool in an ethically challenged situation. So if someone's coming to you with something that's maybe ethically challenging, and if you ask why a lot, and you're like, well, why does this make sense? And why is this helpful? People just go aw…”
Asness: AQR models live factor returns at half the backtested result
“Literally, since our Goldman Sachs days, this is more than 25 years ago, we've generally used half a backtest out of sample as a bogey. And life has worked out fairly close to that.”
Goldman Sachs habitually allows internal investment groups to overlap and compete
“Goldman has a habit of allowing different groups to play in the same areas. We started bumping into other groups within Goldman more and more, and possible investments I was working on, all of a sudden I would get a phone call that it was somebody else's area,…”
Musk tweeted '$420 funding secured' before calling bankers to evaluate buyout
“And Elon put out his infamous tweet around four, 20 funding secured. Then he called the bankers, which was slightly out of order.”
Brosens: Taconic has an 'anti-Goldman clause' diverting 30% to charity if sold
“So we put in a clause which has been Referred to by one of our investors as the anti-Goldman clause, where if the firm ends up either going public or selling at some point down the road, 30% of the economics effectively gets carved out and goes to Ken's and my…”
Rosenthal: Silicon Valley probably needs its own native Goldman Sachs
“People are even talking in Silicon Valley about, like, why is there not a native Goldman Sachs of Silicon Valley, and that's a really good question. There probably should be.”
Cocke: Wall Street cap intro pitches prioritize marketability over fund performance
“I started to realize, you know, what's happening is the Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley's of the world are getting these guys in their cap intro department and they're creating their presentations for them, which it occurred to me what that really meant is th…”
Grantham: Top graduates choose startups and VC over Goldman Sachs
“The really best and brightest don't go to Goldman Sachs, sorry, Goldman Sachs, anymore, like they did in the financial bubble. They want to get into the VC business, to be mixing with things that really matter, and many of them to be actually starting their ow…”
Goldman Sachs Is the Only Major Bank Using Leading Economic Indicators
“And then if you look at, like, the big banks, only Goldman has a few leading indicators. Most economists, like the Fed, ignores them. The Wall Street banks ignore them.”
Post-GFC Bureaucracy at Goldman Sachs Made Small Deals Difficult
“Mine was a few years after the GFC. It just became really tough to do small deals. Number of committees had grown. There was more pressure to write checks that were larger, that were worth the Time and effort to justify the incremental bureaucracy and addition…”
Reynolds: In May 1997, Santa Fe's $1B IPO overshadowed Amazon's debut
“We had just taken public Santa Fe drilling, which was a billion dollar IPO that Goldman Sachs was the lead manager of. Two weeks prior, Amazon had gone public. No one paid attention to Amazon in May of 97. Everybody paid attention to Santa Fe.”
Auby: Once lost, personal reputation can never be fully recovered
“You only have a triple A rating once. Once you lose your triple A rating in life, you'll never get it back. Maybe you can come close, but you'll never get that triple A rating back.”
Hutchinson: Sixth Street Mimics Goldman Sachs' Special Situations Group Model
“They built a business that is mimicking the balance sheet of the special situations group at Goldman Sachs. Pricing any risk up and down the capital structure.”
Mullen: Goldman Sachs initially rejected him as a cultural misfit after 56 interviews
“I then spent, must have been 56 people or something crazy, A person who's pretty well known from Goldman Sachs reaches out to me and says, listen, after 56 interviews, we come to the conclusion you just don't fit here. You're culturally a bad fit. We think you…”
Mullen: Goldman's leveraged finance desk took less risk than 1980s Salomon
“When I ran Goldman Sachs' leverage finance trading desk businesses, we weren't as big in some things as Salomon Brothers had been 15 years earlier. The scale of risk-taking was extraordinary.”
Assessing spinouts from mega-funds like Goldman or Blackstone is uniquely difficult
“The irony is the stronger the firm, the harder that assessment is. So it's harder to assess people actually out of Goldman or Blackstone or some of the really great firms, because it's just harder to tell was it them or was it the firm. If somebody just did an…”
Valuing assets via scrap and collateral creates asymmetric downside protection
“The use of structure and the fact that diversification could work in your favor, the way you could value assets, not just on EBITDA, but on a variety of things, which included collateral value, scrap value, or alternative use type of value.
And so that you cou…”
Sack: Leaving internal sponsors at Goldman means breaking snow alone
“What you learn at Goldman is when you raise your hand and leave the people who are your sponsors, you're breaking snow on your own now”
Steyer: 10% of US wealth clients request ESG versus 90% in Europe
“In the United States, if you talk to the huge asset gatherers, the Black Rocks, the Goldmans, if they get a new investment client, so they come in and they're going to have an investment advisor, and they're going to allocate their portfolio, 10% of them want …”
Lemkau considers Gene Sykes the best M&A banker across multiple generations
“I think is probably the best M&A banker of multiple generations and ended up being a mentor of mine.”
Playing four hours of golf reveals a person's temperament and ethics
“One, it teaches you someone's temperament because everyone hits a bad golf shot, so you see how they are. Two, it teaches you how they treat other people. How someone treats a caddy is very interesting and insightful. It's like how they treat a waiter. And thr…”
Investing businesses require strategic step-backs, unlike advisory market-share mindsets
“The classic investment banker mindset is do everything for anybody all the time, right? Solve their problems. Do more. There's an extra five minutes in the day. I can get one more client and actually trying to pull back from that natural temptation of being in…”
Reluctance to give direct, blunt feedback holds managers back the most
“Blunt talk, like giving real direct feedback. It's an amazing skill and a liberating skill, and not many people do it. I think it's actually one of the biggest things holding back people from becoming effective managers.”
Brosens: Goldman Sachs was considered a 'middling firm' early in his career
“It was viewed as kind of a middling firm at the time. The big firms at the time were First Boston, Morgan Stanley. The banks really weren't players in the space. JP Morgan wasn't really considered a competitor. There were other smaller firms, Bear Stearns, et …”
Brosens: Mid-career family sabbaticals operate as a 'career in reverse'
“I thought of it effectively as a career in reverse. Retiring and spending time with your family when they wanted to spend time with you with a view that I'd eventually go back into work and potentially try and find something that I would do forever.”
Brosens: Mark Winkelman left Goldman Sachs in 1994 after political leadership battle
“Unfortunately, at the end of 94, he ended up Effectively losing a political battle to run the firm and left at the end of that year.”
Brosens: Managing partner capital drives tighter risk discipline than upside-only fees
“The second aspect of it, and I think this was really important and something that we tried to Bring to Taconic was the fact that at Goldman, it was the partner's capital. It wasn't other people's money. And that drove a very different philosophy with respect t…”
Late-1990s private equity firms overlooked enterprise software for chips
“And I realized that none of them, like any in that period of time, none of them are really thinking about software as an area of investment. Some may have had one or two software investments, but they were thinking about technology broadly, and at that time, t…”
Goldman Sachs avoids micro-cap because fees trail middle-manager compensation
“The reason is that Goldman is not going to produce a concentrated microcap strategy because the total fee revenue potential is just a fraction of what a middle manager there makes in a year.”
Goldman Sachs hired Bob Litterman to monetize risk rather than reduce it.
“And when they asked me to be head of risk management, it wasn't because Goldman Sachs wanted to reduce its risk. They wanted to make more money from the risks that they were taking. And if we were taking risks that we weren't getting paid for, we should identi…”
Kraus: Goldman Sachs partners received equal compensation across different specialties
“What was really curious to me about Goldman Sachs was, Goldman Sachs allowed people to specialize, and they compensated the different specialties equally. So at the partnership level, I mean, if you became a partner, you could be a corporate finance specialist…”
Goldman Sachs shifted to trading after the J. Aron takeover
“When the Jay Aaron people took over, it became more trading focused. And so when I was there, it was still very much relationship driven.”
R.K. Mellon's family office consistently outperformed Goldman Sachs in the 1980s
“The chief investment officer was a guy named Arthur Miltonberger, and I covered him as a broker, and what was interesting was that they were consistently outperforming us, so Arthur Who was based in leafy Ligonier, Pennsylvania, which is really a bucolic setti…”
Schwimer: Former Goldman Sachs Employees Failed at Minor League Player Investing
“There were some Goldman guys that quit and tried to do it. They have a couple players, then they left, because they realized they couldn't do it.”
Jenkins: IPOs are priced for sellers, not value buyers
“When you're taking something public, it's probably not a value option, a value play, right? You're taking, you're trying to take advantage of getting a good price in the market For the person who's selling their equity, not buying it.”
Canadian pension governance structures insulate compensation from political control
“The Canadians really set up the model so they're paying market wages. They may not be able to pay as much as Goldman Sachs in Toronto, but they're pretty darn close. They also set it up so that pay doesn't, it's not one year thing, it's three or five year thin…”
Kochard: Private partnerships ensure active crisis management through personal capital risk
“Goldman Sachs was still a partnership, and you saw what happened was that day, and partners at Goldman Sachs were always extremely hands-on, very talented, but you could see it firsthand where the senior people got on the desk and were actually actively involv…”
Barth: Asian financial markets have nearly caught up to Western sophistication
“I think it is light years ahead. They have, if not fully caught up, come very, very close. The management teams are sophisticated. The investors are sophisticated. The pools of capital are deep.”
Goldman's Special Situations Group Levered Its Balance Sheet 8 to 15 Times
“And our capital was using the firm's balance sheet. So firm would allocate some amount of dollars. It would get levered. Eight to 15 times, and then we put it into companies.”
Only roughly 200 evergreen funds existed in the US in late 2024
“Goldman had a report on evergreens in the fall of twenty-twenty-four, and there's really only in the U.S. At the time, there's like 200 evergreen funds. So there's not a lot of choices relative to the thousands of closed-end funds that people can invest in.”
Reynolds: Institutional PE/VC allocations grew from under 1% to 5-10%
“The exposure to Private equity and venture capital for most institutional investors when I started there was probably less than one percent on average, and by the time I left it was probably five or 10, so you can imagine the growth and the transformation that…”
Green: Eastern Advisors bought Goldman Sachs's Alibaba stake in 2004
“We were early investors in Alibaba. We bought out Goldman Steak in in 2004 when I launched the fund.”
Briner: Aspiring investors should skip banking and start directly in investing
“He said, well, it turns out the number one reason that people should study Latin was to be better at English. But you know what's even better to learn English? Studying English. So if you want to be an investor in the long run, why don't you go be an investor?”
Mullen: David Solomon was hired from his team before recruiting him to Goldman
“That person they'd hired away from me was David Solomon, and so David Solomon was recruiting me.”
Goldman Special Situations achieved 20% unleveraged returns post-2001 by conservative pricing
“And what this group at Goldman was doing was buying portfolios of assets, which could be real estate, aircraft, financial assets like receivables, and this was now, 2001, 2002, Nasdaq bubble had burst, and so you could buy these portfolios and not use any leve…”
Goldman occasionally closed distressed deals with immediate Day-1 value certainty
“And when I got to Goldman once in a while, we would make an investment and we'd celebrate as if we had already had a success. The money hadn't come back. We hadn't realized any profit, but we knew that what we had just invested in was worth more than we paid.”