Jan 17 (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs Group on Tuesday reported a 69% drop in fourth-quarter profit, a sharper-than-expected decline linked to heavy losses in its consumer banking business and the collapse transactions for its investment banking arm.
In New York, the title of the bank fell by 2% in the exchanges before the Stock Exchange.
Goldman Sachs reported earnings of $1.19 billion (€1.10 billion), or $3.32 per share, for the three months ended Dec. 31, from $3.81 billion , or $10.81 per share, a year earlier.
In investment banking, fees fell 48% in the quarter while revenue from the asset management division fell 27%.
Goldman Sachs also announced a loss of $ 1.67 billion for its financial solutions branch, which includes activities related to banking transactions, credit cards and fintech.
Faced with the risk of recession, the bank has also provisioned 972 million dollars to deal with the risk of bad debts, against 344 million a year earlier.
The economic context disturbed by the war in Ukraine, galloping inflation and the monetary tightening of central banks caused a sharp slowdown in mergers and acquisitions, which burdened the investment banking activity of Wall Street establishments .
Financial market volatility, however, boosted Goldman Sachs’ trading activities. Revenues in bond, currency and commodity trading soared 44%; those of trading in equities fell by 5%.
Goldman Sachs’ net banking income fell 16% in the fourth quarter to $10.6 billion. (Report Niket Nishant and Noor Zainab Hussain in Bangalore; French version Jean Rosset, edited by Blandine Hénault)