CEO David Solomon has been really worried lately after hearing this from Goldman Sachs representatives.
After surviving a tumultuous few years of staff disruption and business failures (retail banking, Apple credit card), Solly quit his side gig as DJ D-Sol to focus more on his day job, and it’s working out for him. It seems so.
Goldman’s stock price has risen significantly in recent months, outperforming rivals JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.
The company posted explosive profits in the first quarter of this year, even though its deal business remains fairly sluggish.
Can you imagine what happens when things really pick up?
As expected, Solly emerged victorious at the New York-based investment firm’s annual shareholder meeting last week. It easily survived a shareholder vote that required Goldman’s board to split its duties and appoint a new chairman — even if everything fell apart. A seemingly strange locale: Red State Utah.
Salt Lake City to be exact.
Indeed, on the face of it, it’s a strange place for a globalist investment bank to hold a shareholder meeting and its globalist CEO to bow to a job well done (recently).
It’s different when you consider the business rationale behind the venue.
Goldman, like many New York-based companies, has moved operations out of the Big Apple, an unfriendly area due to high crime and taxes.
DJ D-Sol is also said to have to shed his image as one of the more “woke” CEOs on Wall Street in red state America.
Goldman has about 45,000 employees, with more than 3,000 based in Utah, mostly in Salt Lake City.
The state is Goldman’s third-largest employment hub after its New York headquarters and Texas.
And it’s not just back-office employees, it’s banking and technology people as well.
For those who don’t know, Utah has carved out a nice little tech industry known as “Silicon Slope” in the scenic mountains that surround wealthy towns like Park City.
Celebration at Government House
That’s one good reason why Solomon has recently made inroads into the state’s political and business circles.
The Post reported that after Wednesday’s shareholder meeting, select members of the state’s Fat Cat class received special invitations from Mr. Solomon to a private dinner at the governor’s mansion on Wednesday night, a celebration that I learned that Utah Governor Spencer Cox and DJ co-hosted the event. Disol himself.
A Goldman representative confirmed the dinner and Mr. Solomon’s special invitation, saying it was important to know Utah’s “stakeholders” given the state’s importance to Goldman’s ecosystem.
A spokesperson for Salomon said: “It is a great tradition to have dinner with the local community after the general meeting.”
“This dinner was special because of our quarter-century relationship with the state.”
However, my research shows that Goldman does business with states as well as within states.
The company is a major player in Utah’s pension fund business, which is another reason for Solly’s attraction attack.
Red states like Utah have been canceling companies one after another in recent years, and Goldman has no chance of receiving the same treatment given to BlackRock in places like Texas, Tennessee, Florida, and, of course, Utah. seems to be ripe.
Perhaps that’s why Utah Republican State Treasurer Marlo Oakes was high on the list of invitees to Solley’s dinner.
Although Oakes did not comment in this column, he has emerged as a leading critic of woke capitalism and environmental and social governance (ESG).
Although he has not yet targeted Goldman, he has prohibited BlackRock from doing business with the state’s pension funds — and those who know him say he has tarnished the reputations of Goldman and Salomon. He says he is fully aware of this.
A representative for Goldman would not comment on what happened with the dinner or whether Solly was able to get along with Oakes.
My guess is that even if he tried, it would be difficult to sell.
Under DJ D-Sol, progressive ideology has flourished at Goldman, as I point out in my recent book on progressive politics on the board, Go Woke, Go Broke.
Goldman embraces its controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion mandate, which prioritizes gender and race in hiring decisions.
Goldman’s website has a “pronoun guide” that encourages employees to bring their “authentic selves” to the workplace.
The firm is a proponent of ESG, an advanced investment approach that aims to force companies owned by Goldman’s investment arm to exit oil and gas exploration and adopt endless diversification measures.
Goldman says on its website that ESG strategies “can be an important tool for identifying investment risks and seizing opportunities on behalf of clients.”
But it omits independent research showing that ESG is crushing energy investment and driving inflation.
Goldman’s ESG-inspired policies include not underwriting IPOs of companies that do not have gender-diverse directors.
As most have discovered, Goldman’s approach is hypocritical and stupid.
The company has no problem doing business with Chinese companies that have Communist Party apparatchiks on their boards and no members of the oppressed Uyghur minority of either gender.
Sources say they can see why Solly has increased appeal in Utah and other parts of red-state America, where ESG is as popular as the coronavirus.
Goldman already found itself at odds with West Virginia leaders as regulators tried to bar the company from various forms of state business.
Solly wants to avoid the same thing happening in Utah, given the state’s strategic importance to his business model.
