No matter how you feel about Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), you must admit that they are innovative, if nothing else. While Main Street calls for the blood of bankers, Goldman is in a difficult position to show some contrite behavior, yet also strive to retain employees and prevent them from leaving for other opportunities.
In the Q4 Earnings disclosure, we see that while the bonuses are large, they are down significantly as compared to 2007. Gary Goldstein of the Whitney Group, a financial-services job-search firm in New York, commented “I know it sounds ridiculous to Main Street, but it’s a hardship.” Although bonuses may be high in the eyes of Main Street, employees on Wall Street became accustomed to them, and banked on bonuses to pay for their homes, cars, and schools for their children.
In an effort to soften the burden of lower income, one of the options that banks including Goldman, have explored to loosen the squeeze are personal loans and mortgages to cash-strapped bankers. Apparently, Goldman has allowed a small number of employees take out loans through the company’s banking unit. A spokesman told the newspaper the loans don’t carry bargain interest rates, aren’t forgivable, and aren’t connected to compensation. Research of New York real estate records dug up 17 instances of Goldman lending to individual residential property owners in New York City in the last decade. All of them were after mid-2008, during the financial crisis, and of those half involved Goldman employees.
Goldman executives who received individual real estate loans from the bank include managing director Oliver Frankel, Lancelot Braunstein, who manages banking technology for the bank, Annamaria Timofte-Pelfrey, a vice president Annamaria Timofte-Pelfrey, Goldman managing director T. Clark Munnell, and Goldman vice president Justin Lee, Gawker reported.Outside its own employees, Gawker says that Goldman also approved a $4 million mortgage in 2008 for Rodney O. Martin, the chief operating officer of the American International Group (NYSE: AIG). Martin and his wife purchased a $4 million apartment in 15 Central Park West just as the bottom was falling out, and none other than their new neighbor Lloyd Blankfein, who also lives in that building, supplied them with a 30-year mortgage, which was interest-only for the first ten years.
Goldman has drawn the ire of nearly every elected official for compensation paid to employees in 2009, but in the face of the real threat of departure, Goldman once again got innovative, and seem to have protected the franchise.
