# Goldman Sachs **Goldman Sachs** — founded by Marcus Goldman in a Manhattan basement in 1869, a partnership until its 1999 IPO, a bank holding company since the week in September 2008 when it needed the Federal Reserve's window — is the investment bank that supplies American government with its financiers. That is the reason eight of the fifteen pages linking here are People pages: the vault does not track Goldman as a business so much as a **node in the revolving door**, the place where a career in finance is converted into a career in power and back. 2025 revenue was $58.3B and net income $16.3B under CEO David Solomon (since 2018), with about 47,400 employees. ## Government Sachs The pattern predates Trump and is bipartisan, which is the point. Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin (Clinton) and [[Henry Paulson]] (Bush, who ran the 2008 bailout of a system that included his old firm) came from the chairman's office; [[Steve Mnuchin]] (Trump's first Treasury secretary) and [[Gary Cohn]] (his first National Economic Council director) were Goldman partners; [[Steve Bannon]] was a Goldman banker before Breitbart; [[Mark Carney]] spent thirteen years there before running the Banks of Canada and England and then Canada. Central bankers Mario Draghi and Neel Kashkari, and a long list of deputy secretaries and regulators, complete the roster. The 2017 OpenSecrets phrase is the standard one: the door "always spins for Goldman Sachs — by design." The vault's [[Corruption]] page uses it as the reference case of *lawful* capture: nothing is bribed; the people who write the rules and the people the rules govern are the same people at different points in their careers. ## The record Two episodes anchor the firm's reputation. In April 2010 the SEC charged it with fraud over Abacus, a synthetic CDO built so a hedge fund could bet against it without the buyers knowing; Goldman paid $550M without admitting wrongdoing, the largest SEC penalty to that date, and the Senate's Levin report the following year made "shitty deal" a matter of record. In 2020 it paid more than $2.9B to U.S. authorities and $3.9B to Malaysia over 1MDB, the looting of a sovereign fund by a client its bankers had helped raise $6.5B — the first criminal guilty plea by a Goldman subsidiary. The [[Bear Stearns]] and [[2008 Financial Crisis]] pages carry the firm's crisis-era role: it survived by becoming a bank, took and repaid $10B in TARP, and was the counterparty made whole by the AIG rescue. ## In this vault Beyond the door, Goldman appears where finance meets the vault's other subjects. It led the ~$60M 2006 financing of [[Internet Gaming Entertainment]], Bannon's Hong Kong gold-farming venture, with [[Brock Pierce]]. [[Mike Novogratz]], a former Goldman macro trader, became crypto's Wall Street evangelist, and the [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] records the firm's own turn — Solomon in February 2026 calling a rules-based crypto framework "very, very important" as the administration built one. [[Stephen Schwarzman]] and [[Jerome Powell]] appear as counterparties and regulators; [[China]] as the market. And in 2025 the firm briefly became a target: Trump attacked Solomon and chief economist Jan Hatzius by name over Goldman's forecast that the [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] would be paid largely by American consumers — the forecast was standard, the attack was the news. ## See Also - [[Henry Paulson]] · [[Steve Mnuchin]] · [[Gary Cohn]] · [[Steve Bannon]] · [[Mark Carney]] · [[Mike Novogratz]] - [[Corruption]] · [[Financial Regulation]] · [[2008 Financial Crisis]] · [[Bear Stearns]] · [[The Banking System]] - [[Internet Gaming Entertainment]] · [[Brock Pierce]] · [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] · [[Liberation Day Tariffs]]