Goldman Sachs insisted yesterday that it was not interested in pairing with a commercial bank as it reported a 70 per cent fall in third-quarter profits, the biggest quarterly earnings drop since it went public in 1999.
In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America at the weekend, Goldman maintained that it could survive as an independent investment bank without linking up with a commercial bank to gain access to broader sources of funding.
David Viniar, Goldman chief financial officer, said “we have a lot of compassion” for the people at Lehman and Merrill but said Goldman would benefit as a business from the demise of some of its most formidable competitors.