Blankfein steps down at Goldman Sachs

Lloyd Blankfein is retiring as CEO of Goldman Sachs after 12 years at the helm of the storied investment bank.

Blankfein will give way to David Solomon, a long-time Goldman executive who has been considered Blankfein’s chosen successor since earlier this year. Solomon will assume the CEO role from Blankfein on Oct. 1 and become chairman of Goldman in 2019.

The succesion announcement came Tuesday as Goldman announced a

44 percent jump in second-quarter profit from a year ago. The performance was largely driven by the investment bank’s core franchises: advising companies on mergers, acquisitions and other deals, and its trading business.

A long-time Goldman employee who rose through the ranks in commodity trading business, Blankfein took the reins of Goldman Sachs in 2006, not long before the Great Recession and financial crisis. Blankfein moved quickly to save the firm from its near-death experience, tapping the Federal Reserve’s emergency programs set up to keep banks from failure. Eventually and reluctantly, Goldman took money from the $700 billion TARP bailout program, which it repaid. He pushed the firm’s trading desks to aggressively take positions through the market’s volatility and in 2009, only a year after the crisis, Goldman reported record earnings driven largely by trading revenue.