Hi. I’m Aaron Weinman. Roughly a dozen investment bankers said their farewells to Goldman Sachs on Friday.
Senior associates and vice presidents in Goldman’s tech, media, and telecommunications team were handed pink slips in a further sign of strain on a Wall Street apparatus that is hamstrung by depressed dealflow, and suffering from a slowing economy and stubbornly high inflation.
The cuts come after Goldman’s investment bank logged a 41% dip in year-over-year revenues in July. Denis Coleman, the bank’s chief financial officer, also reintroduced Goldman’s dreaded annual performance review, a process that helps the bank weed out underperforming individuals who are likely to be let go.
Click here for the full story from Insider’s Reed Alexander and myself.
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1. Goldman Sachs has started wielding the axe at its investment bank. The cuts in the TMT division come on top of layoffs in the bank’s equity-capital-markets and leveraged-finance teams in Europe and ECM unit in Asia.
“Every year globally we conduct a strategic assessment of our resources and calibrate headcount to the current operating environment,” a spokesperson for the bank told Insider on Friday.
The job cuts are likely to echo across Wall Street, particularly within investment-banking divisions like capital markets and M&A advisory, bankers told me.
Bankers in leveraged finance will also be under the microscope as new deals struggle to gain any traction in today’s market conditions, a banker said. Lenders that underwrote billion-dollar financings for leveraged buyouts — like this $15 billion monster for software company Citrix — will likely wear huge losses because they’re offering the debt to investors at a significant discount.
“As far as layoffs I can’t see how LevFin is not impacted the most within capital-markets teams,” one banker said. “It’s a fickle, ‘boom and bust’ business.”
For the full story on Goldman’s TMT cuts, click here.
In other news:
Supergoop; Blackstone; Anna Kim/Insider
2. Blackstone dealmakers are on the hunt for another consumer-facing favorite. Here is how the private-equity firm, behind cult favorite skincare company Supergoop, is thinking about its next big consumer bet.
3. A Microsoft executive just joined Bank of America for a new role analyzing customer data. Bhavana Bartholf will be BofA’s first chief analytics and innovation officer.
4. Jamie Dimon warned executives to put aside rivalries in order to deliver a “pay-by-bank” project. Here is how JPMorgan Chase’s plan to kill credit cards split the bank, per this story from the Financial Times.
5. Barclays has told its investment bankers to work from the office for at least four days per week, Bloomberg reported. The move to boost in-person work comes ahead of a tougher market cycle, the bank said in a memo.
6. US lawmakers pressed bank chief executives on reports of fraud on the Zelle payments network. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said Zelle was “not safe,” during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Thursday.
7. A protester escaped a prison sentence after gluing himself to a Royal Bank of Canada branch. Vic Brice, who was protesting against RBC Chief Executive David McKay’s support of a gas pipeline in Canada, will not be allowed to take glue outside his home while he serves 12 months of probation.
8. Microsoft executives said it was “wrong” for managers to spy on remote employees’ mouse clicks and keystrokes. Chief Executive Satya Nadella said bosses are plagued by “productivity paranoia.”
9. Apartment buildings are all the rage in real estate, and property-management company DoorLoop is riding that wave. Here is the pitch deck it used to net $20 million in Series A funding from Alpine Investors.
10. Wall Street is completely delusional about the pain that is coming for the stock market. Some individuals think companies’ profits are going to go up in 2023, despite the Federal Reserve making it clear that a recession is likely.
Done deals:
Canadian crypto-trading platform Coinsquare has agreed to acquire rival trading platform CoinSmart. The combination creates one of Canada’s largest crypto platforms and enables both retail and institutional investors to trade digital assets.Wind Point Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm, has acquired electric-vehicle installation company D&H United. The company has 16 branches and more than 570 employees.
Curated by Aaron Weinman in New York. Tips? Email [email protected] or tweet @aaronw11. Edited by Hallam Bullock (tweet @hallam_bullock) in London.