Goldman Sachs is planning on cutting several hundred jobs this month, making it the first major Wall Street firm to take steps to rein in expenses amid a collapse in deals volume.
The bank is reinstating a tradition of annual employee culls, which have historically targeted between 1% and 5% of lower performers, in positions across the firm, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.
At the lower end of that range, which is the size of the expected cull, that means several hundred job cuts at the New York-based firm, which had 47,000 employees at midyear.
People enter the Goldman Sachs headquarters building in New York, U.S., on Monday, June 14, 2021.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Goldman isn’t likely to be the only bank to cut workers. Before the pandemic, Wall Street firms typically laid off their bottom performers in the months after Labor Day and before bonuses are paid out. The practice was put on pause during the last few years amid a hiring boom.
Goldman declined to comment on the record about its plans. The timing of the cuts was reported earlier by the New York Times.
In July, CNBC was first to report that the bank was looking at a return to the annual tradition of year-end job cuts.
Steep declines in investment banking activities, especially IPOs and junk debt issuance, created the conditions for the first significant layoffs on Wall Street since the pandemic began in 2020, CNBC reported in June.
