GS can cope with Lloyd’s illness
As Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (left) embarks on a battle with lymphoma, investors and colleagues are taking comfort in his resilience, the recent example of JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ roster of veteran leaders.
Blankfein said in a statement Tuesday that he has a “highly curable” form of lymphoma and will undergo chemotherapy in New York over the next several months. The 61yearold said he will lead the bank “substantially as normal” while reducing his planned travel.
Goldman Sachs’ management team features a president who’s been with Blankfein since he took the top job, a handful of 30year veterans of the firm, and coheads in each major division that have been in their roles since before the financial crisis.
“Blankfein obviously is a great leader, but they have a very deep bench of senior management, with Gary Cohn probably at the top of it,” Paul Gulberg, an analyst at Portales Partners, said. “It’s a very sad event for any individual or a company, but from a business perspective, I think they’re very well set.”
Investors showed their faith. While Goldman Sachs shares slipped 2 per cent on the news, the slide took place amid an industrywide slump in which Wall Street firms such as BlackRock and Morgan Stanley fell more. The bench includes: n Cohn, 55, who has been president since 2006 and has long been considered one of the top successor candidates
Chief Financial Officer Harvey Schwartz, 51
Vice Chairman Michael Sherwood, 50
David Solomon, 53, cohead of investment banking
Pablo Salame, 49, who helps lead the trading division.
These execs are all seen as poten tial choices, according to current and former colleagues.
Marty Chavez and Stephen Scherr have each taken expanded roles in the past two years, with Chavez heading several new initiatives as chief information officer and Scherr looking for additional sources of growth as chief strategy officer.
Blankfein, the son of a postal worker, grew up in housing projects in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn and earned scholarships to attend Harvard University. He rose through the firm’s currency and commodity trading business and took over as CEO when Henry Paulson left to become Treasury secretary in 2006.