Why Goldman’s re-org is not the U-turn rivals were looking for

David Solomon is having to field some scepticism as he changes Goldman Sachs’s approach to its loss-making consumer banking operation and restructures the firm. But nothing that has been developed is going to waste, and recognising that a business might sit better elsewhere is simply good sense.

U-turns seem to be in vogue at the moment – along with the tendency of those doing the U-turning to pitch any reversals as logical evolutions of what came before. So it is at Goldman Sachs, whose chief executive David Solomon this week cast his latest reorganization of the firm as “the next phase of our growth”.

It might still turn out to be just that. For all the commentary that the latest moves mark a backward step in Solomon’s ambitions for Goldman to broaden its appeal beyond investment banking, there is in fact very little being unwound here.

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