A big debut expected tomorrow for
the Goldman Sachs initial public offering. I believe we share the conviction that
this is in the best interest of all Americans. We still like all businesses
have to change and evolve. Goldman Sachs. One of the top investment banks in
the world, with a history of making money, envied
on Wall Street. It's the biggest of the old
investment banks with almost a trillion dollars in total assets. The allure of working at Goldman
Sachs is that potentially you could be one of the
people running the world. Much admired. Much hated. And you know, the best risk
managers on Wall Street. Everybody wanted to be like Goldman Sachs or
copy it in some ways. Although it hasn't been able to climb
back to its 2009 peak. It's a bank that emerged
from the financial crisis relatively unscathed. Financially, but its reputation
took a beating. And you want people to trust you? From the cream of the
crop, to the vampire squid. Now the company is
targeting the regular consumer. Goldman Sachs is going
from caviar to cheeseburgers. For a 150 years, GOLDMAN served
the most important people in the world. Heads of state. Heads of corporations. Millionaires, billionaires. And now, they're also
serving you that consumer. So how did the bank get
to where it is today. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869
by Marcus Goldman, an immigrant from Bavaria. He started as a peddler in Philadelphia
and then invested in a sewing machine to become a tailor. After about 20 years, Goldman moved to
New York City and opened up shop as a banker. He would buy notes payable from
jewelers and tanners downtown and sell them for a
small profit uptown. In 1882, he brought his son-in-law,
Sam Sachs, into the business and the firm was eventually re-named
Goldman Sachs and Company. Once upon a time, firms all sort of looked a lot alike. They're all small private partnerships
with people whose names were on the door. There was really Mr. Goldman. There was really Mr. Sachs. There were three Lehman
brothers, there were three Lazard brothers. Goldman's son, Henry, joined
the firm in 1885. He went on to re-shape
the financial world decades later. After Goldman Sachs became a member
company of The New York Stock Exchange in 1896, Henry Goldman began
to take over the business. A lot of the Jewish firms like
Goldman Sachs were not allowed to do certain kinds of businesses they weren't
allowed to get in the underwriting of railroads or banks which
were the huge growth engines at the beginning of
the 20th century. They were allowed to
underwrite retail businesses. That's where Henry Goldman pounced. Retail firms wanted capital to expand
but they lacked the assets that industrial companies like
railroads had. He developed a revolutionary idea:
use a company's potential earnings. Its ability to generate income
in the future, to value the company. This became key to the
company's first IPO in 1906: United cigar. And it would become a model
for the future, including the IPO of Sears Roebuck later that year. He was responsible for the initial
underwriting of more than 50 of our country's most successful
publicly owned corporations. And it was the next year in
1907 that Sidney Weinberg, the future leader of the company joined Goldman
as an assistant to the janitor. He would later be named Mr. Wall Street. Through the next half century Goldman
Sachs continued to play a prominent role in banking. It helped companies like B.F. Goodrich and F.W. Woolworth expand by going public. For Goldman Sachs, it was
all about the relationships. Sidney Weinberg spent years after World
War Two courting Henry Ford II and helping him restructure the
company he took over from his grandfather. Their big breakthrough came in the
1950s when Goldman was allowed to underwrite the IPO of
Ford Motor Company. Given that Henry Ford was considered
anti-Semitic was sort of a sea change on Wall Street. And I think after that sort
of Goldman began really to thrive. They were the first firm to house
both a trading operation under a guy named Gus Levy with an
investment banking operation under the infamous Sidney Weinberg. They had a return on equity of
something like 70-75 percent which is just gargantuan numbers. Welcome. Disney Land is Your Land. In 1957, Goldman Sachs led the IPO
of Disney, just a few years after the company opened its theme
park Disneyland in California. When I started out there, Goldman Sachs was probably in the fifth or sixth place in terms of being the leading firm. It wasn't until I'd say the late-70s and early-80s when
Goldman Sachs, because of its client activity and investment banking, the deals it did and so on, began to get the reputation for being the gold standard of the investment banking business. I think a commitment to excellence
and a very low tolerance for sloppiness and a lot
of attention to detail and that started this whole
talk about culture and the Goldman culture was
different from others. To some degree it was although
that difference faded away when the trading era got going. When Gus Levy who ran the trading
business took over the firm as senior partner in 1969, Goldman Sachs
started taking on more risk. When you're a private partnership, they're making bets with their own
money and that absolutely helps them sort of mitigate extreme risk taking
and make sure that firm is prudent overall because if the firm
goes under, it's the actual partners whose names are on the door
or whose capital is in the firm, their money is going to be lost. But as investment banks started going
public in the 1970s, things started to change. All of a sudden you have to go
from a partnership culture to a bonus culture on Wall Street beginning from 1970
and now we're coming up at 50 years of this
kind of shenanigans. Fifty years of people getting
rewarded for essentially taking big risks with other people's money. The traders were street smart,
sales oriented, pat you up the back and let's go to the
Knicks game types, often using ideas for trading that came to them from a bunch
of PhD's we locked in a cage somewhere. But it was a
different set-up from the investment banking troupes who thoughts
of themselves as more the intellectuals. In 1981, Goldman Sachs acquired
a commodities trading firm, J. Aaron and company. It marked a strategic shift in the
business for the bank and future leaders like Lloyd Blankfein and Gary
Cohn rose through the trading ranks. A lot of the leadership
of the firm moved from the investment banking sector to the
to the trading sector. The 1980s saw the rise of private
equity on Wall Street, power brokers dominated culture and Goldman watched
some of its biggest competitors rake in big dollars
by going public. Bear Stearns in 1985. Morgan Stanley in 86 and
then Lehman Brothers in 1994. Goldman made some massive deals
like the purchase of Rockefeller Center in 1995 but the
company stayed a partnership. I joined in the summer of 95. And I say I was very fortunate
because I think I was something like this only the fifth person ever that
joined as a partner when it was a partnership so I felt a little
bit scared because you know I was coming into this remarkable partnership and
then I had no idea what it would be like. I'll never forget the second day I
was getting an email from Jon Corzine who was of course the CEO
asking me what I thought of the lira. And I was shocked. And I gave him an answer and he
answers me back within half an hour. I thought wow, this is
a great cool place. Actually within three months of me
being there they had the first what became pretty well known
big deep debate amongst all the partners about whether they
should or shouldn't go public and the decision was no. For a long time it was felt
that you know Goldman was special would be better off private. You know over time frankly people who
were there at Goldman I mean they would never say it quite this
way but they they got greedy. They realized if they can go public
at four times book value they all stood to make a ton of
money and get really really rich. I mean there was really no reason
at all for Goldman not to go public. Because it got so big anyhow the
idea that it behaved with exactly the same philosophy as the original spirit
of the partnership seems to me to be not as true as
the value of the partnership suggested. So I'm like well you know why
not just become a public company. A big debut expected tomorrow for
the Goldman Sachs initial public offering, The IPO is 10 times... It was one of the biggest IPO's in
history at the time and the company raised three point
seven billion dollars. It made the
partners unbelievably rich. Top partners at the firm probably
made something like 300 million dollars, even less senior partners made
something like a 100 million dollars. So it was a
huge payday across the firm. It was a bonanza. It was a smashing success. Thinking about it nearly 20 years
later, I wish GS would've retained some of the more genuine strength
of what being a partnership forced them to be. Because at the end of the day it
was our own capital that was at risk. Of course while all this was
going on, Goldman's increased influence extended beyond Wall Street
and into politics. After senior partners raked in all
that money, many of them asked: what's next. A lot of them were still young. They now claim you know
wanted to give something back. In truth, what did they wanted to do
is they made all this money on Wall Street, now they
wanted to have power. And if you want to have power
you have to go to Washington. So that led to people like
John Whitehead, senior partner at Goldman, going to work for Ronald Reagan. Bob Rubin becoming first the
national economic adviser for Bill Clinton. Steve Friedman who is
also Rubin's co-senior partner at Goldman also became a
national economic adviser. Rubin of course
became Treasury secretary. Steve Mnuchin, current treasury secretary
is a Goldman guy. Former Goldman partner Gary Cohn of course
and it just became part of the culture, part of the DNA. These men have had significant influence
on banking policy over the last 25 years. Rubin was part of Bill Clinton's
team that de-regulated the banking sector in the 1990s. Gary Cohn was one of the
architects of Donald Trump's corporate tax cuts. And of course Henry Paulson
was the treasury secretary during the financial crisis of 2008, proposing
the 700 billion dollar bank bailout. But we'll get
to that later. And some people say well you
know Goldman Sachs is Government Sachs rotating door. No they just have a lot of smart
people and smart people tend to wind up in positions of power. So what does that mean that cachet. It means they are one to two
degrees of separation from the most important people in the world. Heads of state. Head of corporations. Governments Sachs in my in my book
is a moniker that's well earned. When people push back and say
Government Sachs isn't really a thing I'd say is there any other Wall
Street firm who sent more people into government than Goldman Sachs? And the answer is No. Business boomed after the IPO, the
company was making about two to three billion dollars a year
from 1999 through 2003. By 2007 that profit number
crossed ten billion dollars. It's a tale of two decades
since Goldman Sachs went public. In the first decade, they crushed
it on almost any measure. Earnings growth. Book value growth. Returns. Stock price
outperformance fantastic. But to a degree they were
a victim of their own success. The company divided its revenue
into three main categories: investment banking providing services to companies
and governments when they do things like issue bonds merge
or of course IPO. Asset Management advising clients
on investing their money. And we're talking about very very
wealthy clients, like people with 10 million dollars in the bank. And finally, trading and investments: the
bets the company is making in the market. In 2007, it was that sector, those
market bets that made more than 13 billion dollars for the company, 75
percent of the company's pre-tax profits. Goldman was the darling
of Wall Street. As somebody who wrote a book about
Goldman I understand how they make money from investment banking. I understand how they make money
from Asset Management, but in many ways it's still a big mystery how
they make as much money as they did. Welcome to Today, on a Friday
morning I'm Matt Lauer and I'm Meredith Vieira And if you thought the markets couldn't
get any worse you may be in for a rude awakening. This was the wildest single day
in the history of Wall Street. We are faced with the prospect of
a global meltdown. Goldman Sachs figured out before other
firms that trouble was coming. They began to figure out in December
of 2006 and they made a big proprietary bet against
the mortgage market. Now that's my words. They say they were
hedging their risks. By the time the summer of 2007
came around and the Bear Stearns hedge fund had collapsed, Goldman
made an absolute killing. Four billion dollars in profit. Goldman has always prided itself on
being the best risk managers on Wall Street. And I think the
financial crisis proves that. The week after longtime competitor
Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Goldman got a five billion dollar
investment from none other than Warren Buffett. I have no idea what the stock market's
going to do next month or six months from now. I do know that the American economy
over a period of time will do very well and people will want a
piece of it will do well. When you had other
financial firms literally failing. I mean remember you had Lehman
Brothers and you had Bear Stearns. You have a bunch
of others that failed. Goldman Sachs was strong and they were
so strong that coming out of the financial crisis, they
dominated the trading activity. And so you're like Goldman Sachs
is on top of the world. You know to their credit Goldman Sachs
really really killed it in 2009 making more than 30 billion dollars
in trading, an amount of money that you know Wall Street
might never see again. They really put the
hurt on their competitors. And I think created a lot of
resentment in the marketplace and in public opinion as a result of that. Of course it didn't help that
former CEO Henry Paulson who was Treasury secretary at this point was
the person proposing 700 billion dollars in taxpayer money to
bail out the industry. This Troubled Asset Relief Program has
to be properly designed for immediate implementation and be sufficiently
large to have maximum impact and restore
market confidence. It also didn't help that CEO
Lloyd Blankfein defended the company in an interview with The Times of London
saying he believed the firm was doing God's work. It's because that so many of the
cultural realities of what you all do is jarring to most Americans. This notion of selling a
product that you're betting against is hard for
people to understand. The crux of the critique
came down to this. Goldman Sachs was structuring mortgage
backed securities in its investment banking unit and
selling them to clients. But at the same time, the trading
side of the firm was betting against those deals. Look what your sales team
was saying about Timberwolf. Boy that Timberwolf was one. There was a spotlight that shined
on Goldman Sachs and Main Street didn't know who Goldman Sachs was
and Goldman Sachs did not handle that as well as they should have. They didn't explain to
the public. When Goldman Sachs management testified to
Congress it came across a little stilted and defensive. Do you think you have an obligation
to tell the person that you're selling that security to in that deal
that you are keeping this short position in that deal? That's my question. That we're not going to
cover in the market? Well no. That you intend to keep
that short position. Not forever. It's your intention to
keep that short position. No I don't think we
would have to tell him. I don't even know that
we would know ourselves. It was great political theater. People needed a scapegoat and Goldman
provided an easy target for a scapegoat. Goldman Sachs ended up paying more
than seven billion dollars in settlements surrounding its handling of
mortgage backed securities in the run up to the financial crisis. That's according to KBW
Bank litigation tracker. However, in true Goldman fashion the
company figured out how it could make money even on what
most thought were government fines. Here's how they did it: as part
of the settlement with the Department of Justice, Goldman agreed to provide
one point eight billion dollars in consumer relief. But Goldman Sachs doesn't have a
mortgage business, so they couldn't simply let delinquent borrowers
stay in their homes. Instead, the company bought pools
of distressed mortgages from Fannie Mae and restructured them. They got to count that towards
their fine but they can still potentially make money
off the assets. It's hard to think of anything
more Goldmanesque which is for them turning a penalty into a
moneymaking opportunity which feeds just into this longstanding narrative about
Goldman Sachs which is that these guys are the smartest
guys in the room. Now the flip side of that is
that their reputation is that they are sharks. When we asked Goldman Sachs about
the strategy they directed CNBC to the Independent Monitor's report
on the settlement. As of February 2019, the monitor
validated almost one point three billion dollars in relief. Seventy one percent of the
way to fulfilling the settlement. Goldman Sachs wouldn't comment on whether
it's making a profit on the strategy. And the financial crisis is
not the only scandal to hamper Goldman in the last decade. In 2012 and 2013 the Bank arranged
three bond deals in Malaysia to fund a state investment
fund called 1MDB. It raised six point five
billion dollars to attract foreign investment but according to U.S. authorities it was just a front. They accused a Malaysian financier of
stealing billions from the fund and paying hundreds of millions
of dollars in bribes. Today's case is the largest single
action ever brought by the department's Kleptocracy Asset
Recovery Initiative. When you talk to people on
Wall Street about making 600 million dollars in three bond deals
everybody scoffs at this. This is an insane amount of money
to make on bond deals that are supposedly fairly plain vanilla. At the very highest levels of the
company, maybe if they didn't know what 1MBD was perhaps something
suspicious about that, well maybe they should have dug a little harder
and maybe they should have found out. The investigation into the firm's culpability
is ongoing as of April 2019. Goldman Sachs told CNBC "senior
management was unaware of the criminal activity by Mr. Leissner and his associate who
took extraordinary efforts to hide their part in the illegal scheme. Despite the legal issues Goldman's
advisory business still crushes its competitors on Wall Street but
its trading business has lagged. So Goldman Sachs has gone
from great to good. Look at the first decade
versus the second decade. They were number one in trading and
then they went to number three in trading. The lead has narrowed somewhat and
the stock price the valuation is the lowest that it's been since they've
been a public company in a non crisis period. All of this has prompted one of
the most interesting pivots in Wall Street history. But if you think about the
brand and the way the regulatory environment has changed who we are, it
makes sense for us to have direct relationships
with consumers. In 2016, the company launched
a new product called Marcus. Remember him. It's a digital bank that provides
personal loans and high yield savings accounts. What is it that Goldman is offering
in their bank account that I can't get elsewhere? It's that slightly
higher savings rate. The pitch is we are you know we are a
new bank we're a new approach. We're not gonna nickel and
dime you on fees. We're going to be very transparent. We're going to be very clear to
you about how we make money. And this is sort of a new
way of doing fintech these days. To be clear, this is still a
tiny part of Goldman's overall business but the trend of investment banks
starting to look more like commercial banks is real. In a post financial crisis
world, diversification is important. Goldman said it had 46 billion
dollars in online retail deposits across the U.S. and the U.K.. That's pocket change compared to competitors
like Bank of America or JP Morgan with more than a
trillion dollars in deposits each. But it's seen as
a growth opportunity. See, none of this is going
to fundamentally change Goldman Sachs who we are, how we're making money in the
short term, but we think we can build very successful platforms that over
time will make a meaningful contribution. Goldman Sachs is going from Wall Street
to Main Street and look at how they're doing this they're doing this
with more technology more like Silicon Valley. Today, we're introducing a brand new
service and we call it Apple card. There was an opportunity that I think
Apple saw and we saw to redesign certain aspects of the credit card. They're doing this with
a younger workforce. Three fourths are
millennials or younger. They're doing this with a more
relaxed dress code and they're doing this with a CEO who
is a part time DJ. Look, the jury is out on
the effectiveness of this new path. A lot of us are watching. If history is any guide Goldman Sachs
will find a way to make money.
Blankfein is to banking what Mahatma ghandi is to Buddhism
I just received an Advertisement from Goldman Sachs a few Minutes ago on Twitter.
Love them or hate them, their online savings account and other savings venues are incredible.