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
Steyer: Farallon eventually became Goldman Sachs's largest clearing client
“And then over time, I was Goldman's biggest clearing customer.”
Steyer: Goldman Sachs had zero China staff and two in Hong Kong in 1983-1985
“Goldman Sachs, which was, as I said, I think the premier investment bank in the world, when I worked there in 1983 to 1985, had zero people in China and two people in Hong Kong.”
Steyer managed half of Goldman's risk arb but earned 0.1% of profits
“My last year at Goldman Sachs, just to put it in a context of investment, I was running half of the investments for the art group. They paid me one 10th of one percent of the income from the art group.”
Lemkau, Robert Smith, and Mark McMorris launched Goldman's West Coast tech M&A
“It was a guy named Mark McMorris, who went on to go work at General Atlantic for a long time, and then Robert Smith, who eventually went on to go found Vista Equity, and me, the three of us went out there, all the same associate class, like three musketeers st…”
Brosens: Risk arb drove the lion's share of Goldman's risk in the 1980s
“Most of the risk at the time at Goldman Sachs was taken in the arbitrage area. There was very little risk being taken elsewhere in the firm. Jay Aaron had not yet been bought. They really didn't take an awful lot of risk in the fixed income side. The lion's sh…”
Brosens: Goldman risk arb grew to nearly $1B in capital by 1987
“I think we had a couple hundred million dollars worth of risk at the time when we started. It grew so that by the time I started running the area in early 87, we were running close to a billion dollars worth of capital.”
Brosens: Goldman risk arb lost 4% ($40M) in 1987 crash with 70% cash
“We came into about 70% cash. We were down four. We had a number of hedges in place. So Not unreasonable, but four percent of a billion dollars was 40,000,040 million to the partners was a very large loss.”
Brosens: Robert Rubin's investment philosophy centered on managing uncertainty and downside risk
“Bob's philosophy was one of uncertainty. He wrote a book on it where you couldn't know things for sure. You had to know what could go wrong. You had to estimate the probability of that thing going wrong and effectively being humble about your confidence level …”
KKR Prepaid for Goldman Sachs Financial Coaching for C.H.I. Workers
“I think we've gotten it right on the back end in terms of when we sold the business, prepaying for financial coaching with Goldman Sachs, prepaying for tax help to make sure people appropriately and timely file their taxes.”
Libby: GETCO executed more orders in a minute than Goldman did daily
“Just to give people a sense, GetGo traded more orders in a minute than all of Goldman's clients at the time in a day.”
Salem: Providence did more deals with Goldman Sachs PIA than any other PE firm
“We did more deals with Goldman Sachs PIA, you know, private equity division of Goldman Sachs than any other private equity firm because they knew we weren't a threat.”
Al Gore asked Goldman Sachs to advise on a $35M sustainability acquisition
“Phil had been approached by Al Gore about Goldman Sachs representing Gore in acquiring a company called Sustainable Asset Management. And it was a very small acquisition. I think it would have been thirty-five million dollars or something like that, an acquisi…”
Novogratz: Goldman desk made hundreds of millions on 1997 Asian crisis
“Goldman Sachs, Asia's blowing up, and we predicted it, had the foresight, and had some spectacularly highly leveraged bets that Asia would blow up that we were smart enough to figure out. It wasn't, I had so much courage that I took all this risk to make a for…”
The 1980s era under Weinberg and Whitehead was Goldman's golden era
“I personally think, and I know they're more profitable today and so forth, but that that was a golden era for Goldman Sachs. It was run by John Weinberg and John Whitehead, but other leaders like Bill Gruber and Roy Zuckerberg and Richard Menchel and so forth.”
Baumgartner: 2014–2018 equity returns doubled consensus forecasts while volatility halved
“Back in 2013, 20 14, you've got bears projecting low returns... You've got folks like Goldman and JP Morgan, and the folks who publish capital market expectations, and you see, eh, equities, seven percent annualized return, 15% vol... Now, you fast forward fiv…”
Goldman Sachs did not distribute research notes to clients until 1964
“In fact, Goldman Sachs didn't start sending things out until 64 or five, and that was just one of the salesmen thought it might be an interesting idea to put Four sides of sheet of paper. Little information on four different possible investments. He was doing …”
Lydon: Smart beta fees are down to nine bps at Goldman
“You can get a smart beta strategy at Goldman for nine basis points. You have pure beta strategies now for four.”
Goldman Sachs employs 12,000 software developers, per Auby
“I heard a statistic saying they have 12,000 developers now at Goldman, which is just an astronomical number if you think about that”
Sack: Joining Goldman Sachs over dot-com startups was unpopular in early 2000
“Went back there after business school, which was very unpopular in March, February of 2000. You were really viewed quite negatively, and Unimaginatively, if you were going back into these, when you could be working at pets.com.”
Steyer: Goldman's risk arb desk was profitable every year in the 1970s
“But the Goldman Arb group managed to make money every year through the seventies.”
Persisting with hostile clients during financial crises builds enduring relationships
“Those early days of the financial crisis were scary, but it also ended up being incredibly character building because you go out there while you're probably the pariah to society and you go and build relationships with clients who are predisposed to not want t…”
Goldman promoted Davis to distressed desk because external hires cost 3x
“And in the end, they asked me and another guy to co-manage the distressed bond desk there. I think we were doing a reasonably good job, but I also found out after the fact that everyone else was asking three times what they were paying me to come in and take t…”
Davis: There were no utility bankruptcies for 20 years before Enron and PG&E
“So, you know, at that point, I don't think there'd been a utility bankruptcy in two decades and lo and behold, We had Enron. And then we had Pacific Gas and Electric the first time around.”
Blood: Voted against taking Goldman Sachs public in 1998 and 1999
“I was very committed to Goldman Sachs and its business principles and culture, and I was one of the partners who voted to stay private in 1999, actually originally in 1998.”
Goldman Sachs considered and rejected launching an online broker in 1996
“I was actually asked In 1996 to consider whether Goldman Sachs should set up an online discount broker. Which we ultimately included was a bad idea”
George Walker created Goldman Sachs's first outsourced CIO practice
“George Walker, who's now running Neuberger, had come up with this idea that I really described as the first outsource CIO at Goldman. We were over the wall working with large institutional families, a lot of times pre-transaction.”
Scaramucci: Fired from Goldman Sachs real estate group after 18 months
“My first day on the job was August 1419 89, I got fired from the job on February first, 1991, so I was only there for 18 months.”
Scaramucci: Rehired at Goldman Sachs in 1991 as interdepartmental transfer
“And on March 2819 91, I got rehired at Goldman Sachs. And now the best part of this story Is the personnel director for the division called me and said, hey, you know, you got really good news for you. You're never going to have to tell anybody you got fired. …”
Goldman Sachs hired only 18 global analysts in 1992, says Seides
“I remember interviewing at Wall Street and Goldman Sachs investment banking program had 18 global analysts.”
Solomon: Hedge funds evolved from 1980s Wall Street prop desk spinouts
“If you think about the way the hedge fund business evolved, it evolved from people who were on the prop desks, you know, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, you know, all these different places in the eighties, and they spun out and started their own firms Largely…”