雅虎香港財經 Goldman Sachs CEO: 'There is no hiring freeze' despite economic slowdown
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon wants to set the record straight: The storied investment bank isn't hitting the brakes on hiring despite the firm’s renewed efforts to watch costs into a potential economic downturn amid elevated inflation.
“There is no hiring freeze at Goldman,” Solomon said on Yahoo Finance Live at Goldman’s 10,000 Small Businesses Summit on Tuesday (video above). “We're looking at all our resources around the firm, financial and otherwise, and we are slowing the pace of our hiring. So we've grown the firm enormously over the course of the last few years. We've done a significant amount of hiring. We had planned to do meaningful hiring in the back half of the year. And we're slowing it down. But we haven't frozen it."
The comments come after a better-than-feared quarter from Goldman Sachs on Monday amid strength in fixed income and equities trading. Earnings of $7.73 a share beat analyst forecasts of $6.58 a share.
Second-quarter sales and profits, though, did fall though by 23% and 48% respectively as the company was swept up into the industry-wide softness in investment banking activities. Investment banking sales dropped 42% from a year ago as companies delayed deal-making during a pickup in stock market volatility brought on by aggressive Federal Reserve rate tightening plans.
More generally, with the stock market in bear market territory amid economic uncertainty and record inflation, the financial industry is facing potential layoffs.
Goldman Sachs is now joining other big Wall Street banking firms like JP Morgan on clamping down on spending, ranging from travel expenses to hiring plans ahead of what could be a rocky period for the global economy. BlackRock recently announced it would also be curtailing new hires as rumors of layoffs continue sweeping through the financial sector.
Goldman intends to reinstate its annual performance review for employees in an effort to curtail costs. (The review was previously put on hold during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
"One of the things that's important to understand about Goldman Sachs and the way we operate — it's a very performance-based culture," Solomon said. "We're always looking to make sure that people that aren't performing in our organization don't hang around because it prevents us from giving the opportunity to hire more people that can really perform."
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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