(Reuters) – Goldman Sachs will start cutting thousands of jobs around the world on Wednesday, two people familiar with the plan said as the group braces for a tough economic environment.
According to one of the sources, just over 3,000 jobs should be cut, but the final total has not yet been set.
Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
Bloomberg reported Sunday that Goldman Sachs will lay off 3,200 people.
The bank had 49,100 employees at the end of the third quarter, after hiring a significant number of people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While most of Goldman Sachs’ major divisions are expected to be affected, the investment banking arm is likely to be at the heart of the job cuts, one of the sources said.
Hundreds of jobs are also set to be cut in the struggling consumer products division after retail subsidiary Marcus plans were scaled back, the sources said.
The bank’s chief executive, David Solomon, sent a year-end voice memo to staff, warning them of a reduction in staff in the first half of January, according to two separate sources. Goldman Sachs declined to comment on this memo.
These job cuts come before the bank’s annual bonus payments, which usually take place at the end of January. According to several industry experts, these bonuses should decrease by around 40%.
Goldman Sachs had restarted its annual job cut program in September, which had been suspended for two years due to the pandemic.
The group generally reduces its workforce between 1% and 5% each year. Expected job cuts would add to these reductions.
The turbulent economic context in 2022 with the war in Ukraine, the inflationary surge and the monetary tightening of the major central banks, has put a stop to mergers and acquisitions operations, which has caused investment bank commissions to fall .
The latter nearly halved in 2022, with $77 billion in global revenue, down from $132.3 billion a year earlier, according to Dealogic data.
(Reporting Saeed Azhar in New York and Scott Murdoch in Sydney; French version Jean Terzian and Jean Rosset, edited by Blandine Hénault)
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