Goldman Sachs reported a $504 million impairment related to home-improvement lender GreenSky and another $485 million in impairments connected to real estate investments Wednesday.
All told, Goldman’s second-quarter earnings report, which the bank posted Wednesday, marked its lowest three-month profit total in three years, according to the Financial Times.
The bank’s net income dropped nearly 60% year-over-year, to $1.22 billion, according to the report. Meanwhile, Goldman’s operating expenses grew 12% to $8.54 billion, the bank reported.
Goldman’s investment banking revenue fell by about 20%. The industry as a whole has seen a roughly 38% decline in dealmaking so far this year.
CEO David Solomon remained positive in his prepared statement Wednesday.
“This quarter reflects continued strategic execution of our goals. Global Banking & Markets delivered solid returns in an environment with cyclically low activity levels and we remained #1 in completed M&A — a testament to our world-class client franchise,” he said. “I remain fully confident that continued execution will enable us to deliver on our through-the-cycle return targets and create significant value for shareholders.”
Goldman’s earnings reports have been arguably the most watched in banking ever since the lender reorganized in October to put much less emphasis on its efforts to grow in consumer banking.
That strategy has lost the bank more than $3 billion since 2020, Goldman reported in January.
The bank is trying also to find a buyer for its maligned GreenSky unit. And it’s undergone no fewer than three rounds of layoffs in the past year.
"They definitely missed the target,” Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab, told Reuters on Tuesday, of Goldman’s second-quarter earnings. “That seems to be an outlier relative to virtually all the other major banks.”