Finance

Goldman Sachs is planning its second round of layoffs in less than 3 months, after initially saying job cuts would resume in 2021 (GS)

  • Goldman Sachs is planning to lay off hundreds of employees — less than 1% of its workforce — Bloomberg reported on Tuesday and Business Insider confirmed.
  • The cuts will be spread across different divisions and office locations and aren’t particularly concentrated within specific teams, a person familiar with the bank’s plans told Business Insider.
  • Goldman is cutting jobs for the second time in less than three months after saying earlier this year that it had held off on layoffs amid fallout from the pandemic but would resume them in 2021.
  • Goldman and some other Wall Street firms had put job cuts on pause, but with no end to the pandemic in sight, many have resumed those plans.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Goldman Sachs is planning a new round of layoffs this week, its second in less than three months, Bloomberg reported earlier on Tuesday and Business Insider confirmed.

A person familiar with Goldman’s plans told Business Insider the bank will make hundreds of cuts — amounting to less than 1% of its workforce — across various divisions and office locations, and that the cuts won’t be specifically concentrated within specific teams.

The second wave of cuts comes after the bank laid off around 400 employees in September, Bloomberg first reported, despite suggesting this summer that job cuts wouldn’t resume until 2021 as the pandemic plunged the economy into a recession and caused unemployment rates to surge.

“At the outbreak of the pandemic, the firm announced that it would suspend any job reductions. The firm has made a decision to move forward with a modest number of layoffs,” a spokesperson for Goldman told Business Insider at the time.

Goldman is not the only bank to have reversed course and resumed layoffs. In recent months, other firms have decided to once again proceed with cost-saving plans: Giants like HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Wells Fargo have all moved forward with cuts.

Read more: Wall Street job cuts are back — here’s the latest on what Goldman, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, and other banks are doing

In June, Goldman CEO David Solomon told Bloomberg TV that the firm had thus far refrained from making broad cuts until 2021 “because it hasn’t been appropriate,” he said, adding that Goldman hires 2,000 to 3,000 people out of school each year and normally looks at the firm’s bottom 5% to make room for new blood. He also said Goldman still has medium- and longer-term goals to run more efficiently that it had laid out at its first-ever investor day.

But as COVID-19 cases surge again this winter and a widely available and effective vaccine likely remains months away, many Wall Street firms have restarted the massive cuts they already had planned before the pandemic hit.

Read more: Goldman Sachs’ CFO explained why he’s feeling more confident about plans to move employees to lower-cost hubs like Salt Lake City and Dallas

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