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The first wave of this year's retirement announcements have begun to circulate at Goldman Sachs & Co., with at least five partners of the firm revealing plans to step down come November 30.
Among the general partners that will officially retire from Goldman at the end of the firm's fiscal year are: Gary Rose, a generalist in corporate finance; R. Ralph Parks Jr., an investment banker who has headed the firm's Canadian effort; Edward Poppiti Jr., co-head of Goldman's US listed equity business; Richard Atlas, a head of the Los Angeles office involved in the US listed, Nasdaq, and Latin American shares businesses; and William Kealy, a co-head of global investment research.
The last of the big investment banking partnerships, Goldman Sachs is slated to promote new members to its coveted partnership roster this fall. An every-other-year event, the closely-watched partnership appointments are traditionally preceded by a spate of retirement announcements.
But the retirement of partners may have become an annual event. For the first time last year, almost a dozen partners went limited in a non-partnership year. This was apparently done in order to keep an orderly ebb and flow of the firm's senior personnel and its capital. Partners, of course, begin to take out their capital when they retire. For dozens to do so at once could have too strong an impact on the firm's capital base.
As Goldman Sachs has swelled in size, it has been faced with a choice: either allow the partners' roster to balloon, or cycle partners through its ranks faster, thereby opening...