Investment banking pertains to certain activities of a financial services company or a corporate division that engages in providing advisory-based services on financial transactions for clients, such as institutional investors, corporations, and governments. Traditionally associated with corporate finance, such a bank might assist in raising financial capital by underwriting or acting as the client's agent in the issuance of debt or equity securities. An investment bank may also assist companies involved in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and provide ancillary services such as market making, trading of derivatives and equity securities, FICC services or research. Most investment banks maintain prime brokerage and asset management departments in conjunction with their investment research businesses. As an industry, it is broken up into the Bulge Bracket, Middle Market, and boutique market.
The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many international financial centers. Goldman Sachs is the second largest investment bank in the world by revenue and is ranked 55th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. In Forbes Global 2000 2023 Goldman Sachs ranked 34th. It is considered a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.
Jane Bryant Quinn is an American financial journalist. Her columns talk about financial topics such as investor protection, health insurance, Social Security, and the sufficiency of retirement plans.
Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books, former co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast, and publisher of the Racket News on Substack.
Gary David Cohn is an American businessman and philanthropist who served as the 11th Director of the National Economic Council and chief economic advisor to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. He managed the administration's economic policy agenda. Before serving in the White House, Cohn was president and COO of Goldman Sachs, where he worked for more than 25 years. Cohn was appointed vice-chairman of IBM on January 5, 2021.
Lloyd Craig Blankfein is an American investment banker who has served as senior chairman of Goldman Sachs since 2019, and chairman and chief executive from 2006 until the end of 2018. Previous to leading Goldman Sachs, he was the company's president and chief operating officer (COO) from 2004 to 2006, serving under then-CEO Henry Paulson.
William David Cohan is an American business writer.
Zero Hedge is a far-right libertarian financial blog and news aggregator. Zero Hedge, per its motto, is bearish in its investment outlook and analysis, often deriving from its adherence to the Austrian School of economics and credit cycles. While often labeled as a financial permabear, Zero Hedge has also been described as a source of "cutting-edge news, rumors and gossip in the financial industry".
Jonathan Weil is an American journalist, analyst and attorney. Born July 20, 1970, he grew up in Hollywood, Florida, and attended Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991 and a juris doctor degree from Southern Methodist University in 1995.
The Raj Rajaratnam/Galleon Group, Anil Kumar, and Rajat Gupta insider trading cases are parallel and related civil and criminal actions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States Department of Justice against three friends and business partners: Galleon Group hedge fund founder-owner Raj Rajaratnam and former McKinsey & Company senior executives Anil Kumar and Rajat Gupta. In these proceedings, the men were confronted with insider trading charges: Rajaratnam was convicted, Kumar pleaded guilty and testified as key witness in the criminal trials of Rajaratnam and Gupta, and Gupta was convicted in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan in June 2012.
The aluminium price-fixing conspiracy was an effort by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Glencore and their warehouse companies to inflate the price of aluminium by creating artificial supply shortages at their warehouses between 2010 and 2013.
Circle began as a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
Anthony Noto is an American businessman, the CEO of SoFi, and the former COO of Twitter.
The 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, often referred to as the 1MDB scandal or just 1MDB, is a corruption, bribery and money laundering conspiracy in which the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) was systematically embezzled, with assets diverted globally by the perpetrators of the scheme. Although it began in Malaysia, the scandal's global scope implicated institutions and individuals in politics, banking, and entertainment, and led to criminal investigations in a number of nations. The 1MDB scandal has been described as "one of the world's greatest financial scandals" and declared by the United States Department of Justice as the "largest kleptocracy case to date" in 2016.
David Michael Solomon is an American investment banker and the chief executive officer (CEO) of Goldman Sachs, a position he has held since October 2018. He has also been chairman of the bank since January 2019. Before assuming his role as CEO, Solomon was president and chief operating officer from January 2017 to September 2018, and was joint head of the investment banking division from July 2006 to December 2016. Solomon formally succeeded Lloyd Blankfein, the previous CEO, on October 1, 2018, and was named chairman after Blankfein's retirement.
John LeFevre is a former Salomon Brothers and Citigroup investment banker and bond syndicate executive. LeFevre is known for creating the anonymous Goldman Sachs Elevator (@GSElevator) Twitter handle. The account purported to reflect and satirize banking culture, and accumulated considerable followers and press coverage. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup launched internal investigations in an attempt to identify the source(s) of the tweets.
Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, has been the subject of controversies. The company has been criticized for lack of ethical standards, working with dictatorial regimes, close relationships with the U.S. federal government via a "revolving door" of former employees, and driving up prices of commodities through futures speculation. It has also been criticized by its employees for 100-hour work weeks, high levels of employee dissatisfaction among first-year analysts, abusive treatment by superiors, a lack of mental health resources, and extremely high levels of stress in the workplace leading to physical discomfort.
Apple Card is a credit card created by Apple Inc. and issued by Goldman Sachs, designed primarily to be used with Apple Pay on an Apple device such as an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Mac. Currently, it is available only in the United States, with 6.7 million American cardholders in early 2022.
Katie Benner is an American reporter for The New York Times covering the United States Department of Justice.
Stephen Scherr is the Chief Executive Officer of Hertz and a member of the company’s Board of Directors since February 2022.
