Goldman Sachs released its earnings today, with a $3.4 billion profit for the quarter.
For the three months of the year ended in June, Goldman’s spending on workers’ salaries and benefits was up 47 percent from the same quarter last year, to $6.6 billion. This compensation spending was up 30 percent from the second quarter of 2006, the height of the credit bubble.
What does this mean for New York?
In the next eight months, Goldman’s profit and compensation surge could mean a spike in New York’s personal-income-tax collections from their slumpy levels. Other firms are impelled to increase their own compensation to compete with Goldman.
Such a spike will feed political complacency regarding massive spending imbalances at the city and state level.
Such complacency is possible because the Obama administration and Congress have not yet designed or implemented a credible way of liquidating big financial companies and making their lenders take losses if warranted.
Thus, firms like Goldman continue to benefit from the ability to borrow cheaply and take risks with that borrowed money in the market.
Yet the risks to New York grow.
Goldman got fewer revenues from stable sources and more revenues from volatile sources.
Goldman’s revenues from asset management and securities services — that is, managing people’s money without taking significant risk — was down 28 percent from the same period last year.
By contrast, revenues from “trading and principal investments,” in which Goldman often takes significant risk on behalf of its own shareholders and lenders (and implicitly and sometimes-not-so-implicitly us), were up 93 percent.
For example, Goldman inked out an $811 million revenue gain in the “principal investment” part of “trading and principal investments.” However: of that gain, $948 million was from a write-up of Goldman’s investment in a Chinese bank.
This trend has been going on in the investment-banking industry for more than a decade. It continues unabated by the market’s verdict of the modern i-banking business model, because the government has propped up that model.
For New York, city and state, this increased dependence on volatile revenue sources is the same old story. It makes New York’s tax collections that much more vulnerable to the same volatility.
___
*The periods are not directly comparable. Last year, Goldman’s second quarter ran from March through May, and this year, it runs from April through June. But if the switch doesn’t bother GS in making comparisons, it doesn’t bother FW.
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