By Tatiana Bautzer
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Goldman Sachs President John Waldron said on Thursday that the outlook for investment banking remains “quite good.”
The bank’s pipeline for deals worldwide is strong despite uncertainty over timing as U.S. tariff policies roil markets and stall activity, he told investors at a conference.
“Our investment banking business is very strong, and I think the outlook remains quite good,” Waldron said. “The pipeline is strong all over the world … but as we’ve already said, the element of volatility makes it hard” to predict when deals will materialize.
Corporate clients have a positive bias toward transactions and are still holding discussions about mergers, acquisitions and raising capital, Waldron said.
Despite a broader slump in M&A, he cited a 30% increase in large deals valued at more than $500 million in the year to date as evidence of the market’s resilience.
“Obviously in the second quarter it’s been much slower than in the first … Nonetheless, even post-Liberation Day, we’ve worked on a number of very sizable, important M&A transactions,” said Waldron, who also serves as Goldman’s chief operating officer.
The executive joined the bank’s board this year and was awarded a retention bonus of $80 million, cementing his position as a potential successor to CEO David Solomon.
The Wall Street firm is carrying out broader succession planning, starting with its elite group of partners and broadening out through its leadership, Waldron said.
“We do an enormous amount of succession planning and we have succession plans for about 300 of the top roles at the firm,” he said.
The company is “very choosy” about adding staff, he said, noting that out of 875,000 people who applied for experienced positions, fewer than 1% were hired. And of the roughly 300,000 applicants for summer internship programs, about 1% are taken on board.
Separately, Waldron noted some improvement in the beleaguered commercial real estate market, which had been battered by remote-working policies during the pandemic.
“We’re starting to see some signs of recovery in commercial real estate, which has been a tougher area,” he said. “We are seeing opportunities to finance recapitalization in CRE.”
Waldron expressed confidence that the bank would meet its return targets for investors.
(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer in New York, Editing by Lananh Nguyen, Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)
