American investment bank. Goldman Sachs has nudged managers to move to Dallas and Salt Lake City as part of a broader shift of financial-industry jobs away from New York. Estimates from the bank suggest that fully 10% of households in New York City with incomes of more than $10m established residency elsewhere between 2018 and 2023.
The firm was known as "Government Sachs" because so many departing executives went into public service. Under Lloyd Blankfein, who ran Goldman from 2006 to 2018, the firm was run as a merchant bank in the mould of J.P. Morgan: simultaneously advising, financing and investing. Its mantra was "long-term greedy", discouraging a short-termist "eat what you kill" philosophy among traders. Goldman came through the 2007-09 financial crisis relatively unscathed but became a target of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the press—Rolling Stone memorably called it a "vampire squid".
The ratio between the market value of Goldman Sachs and Blackstone is a proxy for the shift from bank-dominated to investment-firm-dominated American finance. After five years of being worth roughly the same, Goldman was by early 2026 worth nearly twice as much as Blackstone, as it had been through most of the 2010s—a sign that the private-credit boom's lustre was fading.
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil"