According to Scott Rothbort, yes! Granted, he is a writing this as a columnist for TheStreet.com, but maybe he’s on to something?
Comments (55)
Leave a comment
You can log in with your account or comment as a guest below.
email: tips@dealbreaker.com
text: (646) 820-4847
call: (212) 334-1871
all tips are anonymous
According to Scott Rothbort, yes! Granted, he is a writing this as a columnist for TheStreet.com, but maybe he’s on to something?
You can log in with your account or comment as a guest below.
Bankruptcy = No longer a public corporation
FIRST!!!
Any Brokerage/IB/Financial Svcs Co. that has any intelligence woudl consider going private.
There is absolutely no benefit to remaining a public company in this environment.
Hasn’t been for years already!
If private == govt. owned, then yes, they are going private.
Warren will be miffed!
Completely out of topic, but Becky Quick is looking particularly hot today, or is it that I have a nasty hangover?
@5 …no, you’re just still drunk
Remember Warren has warrants of $5Bln to buy GS at $115. I wouldn’t about W.B.’s profitability.
As a private PE guy, i think that is the smartest move they can make.
Being happy in finance is all about avoiding:
- Government
- M2M (being public)
- Redemptions (being an open end fund)
Without those you’ll be living happily and if you fuck up it takes years before your investors.
@5
I don’t think it’s the booze talking, she’s looking like a 1 right now (on the binary scale)
def a 1
GS and MS will both be owned by the gov’t, and put in charge of the TARP (as punishment), while all their execs jump ship and start Greenhill^10000
Link doesn’t work.
Those warrants will be great when they go out at 90.
GS = $40. by January. I told you white boys!
Obama
GM shares halted.
As much as I despise GS, going private would be a great move-bastards!
Not a chance. You guys are silly.
Blankie – Obama just called and wants the $10 Billion back. This money belongs to The People.
@ 15
What are you talking about? You mean without access to public equity? Who cares.
They will be my minions.
-General M. Bison
GM – ouch
@ 20
I think he means without $2.5 billion
so where does GM go to when they let it start trading again?
@ 14 priceless. If I wanted change I would go to a bank
@24 begging
Oh Bess, I’d love to take you private…
Uncle Sam will not let GM, Ford, & Chrysler fail. The damage would go far beyond anything Lehman Bros could ever inflict on the US economy.
That is the opinion of TGFD.
The Guy from Delaware
Well TGFD, rumor has it that you have been wrong before…
TGFD, more cash is going to help them? once upon a time corporations use to fail, and the crazy thing about it is that other business came up right behind them. they are bleeding cash, so you want to cover up the wound with more of it?
We are not going Private. I assure you. We have supremely qualified, highly touted, smart people with high GMATs and good ivy-league MBAs like me at the helm.
So what I can’t access dealbreaker from 85 Broad. I have my iPhone for that.
So we’re not going private. We got some real smart mofos working around me, myself being the smartest one.
So screw your rumors!
_GOLDMAN_BALLER
There is no chance GS goes private – they have more issues than you all know and they NEED the government by their side until the delevering process is over – which by the way is NOT EVEN CLOSE here… Going private puts them in a place they cannot recover from. They need MONEY and going private shuts the FREE money door.
Going private would be pretty excellent. Many partners disagreed with the decision to go public in the first place, and it was Hank who pushed the IPO through. Then he goes to Treas and takes all his IPO profits tax free before helping to force GS back into privacy. I love it. (note that the current stock price is barely above the IPO opening level.)
@31 That attempt at “sarcasm” was pathetic. EPIC FAIL.
I am sorry that the investment banks ever went public in the first place (and this includes tearing down the walls between commercial and investment banks). The sole purpose of an investment bank is to make money for investment bankers. To allow them to take nearly all of the upside (they let little trickle through to the shareholder) and have much less equity at risk on the downside has meant that moral hazard was present from the beginning.
I was a junior banker with GS LA Team until last week.
Who knows anything about real estate development?
How do you get started in this game if you want to ‘wildcat’ if you will.
Any suggestions on how to capitalize on the current environment?
Using the term EPIC FAIL represents an EPIC FAIL.
No need to go private. Walk out the door and set up shop across the street. Start all over. New name: “Gwhiz”.
@33
Pretty sure Corzine was the guy who pushed the IPO through
Anal_yst,
Correct.
A GS partner once said to me “no one will ever take Goldman private except Goldman” … that was with the market cap at about $80-85 BN and PE shops firmly in control … with the stock price nearly round-tripping to 1999 IPO price ($53) has to be a huge motivating factor for the remaining partners (+ Buffett or whomever else is sitting on $2-10BN) to take it back private .. yes, it will still have the same issues (poor access to leverage/funding, gov’t scrutiny, locked up financial markets) but without the glare of public equity holders they can maneuver a lot easier along the fringes.
If this does not come to fruition, I’d have to agree with @38, which is ironically what I was talking about last night with some people. Why WOULDN’T the best prop / PIA guys leave en masse, esp if the rumors are true and they’re all getting coal for a bonus this year? they could start GS 2.0 without the shitty balance sheet and start re-building a smaller (yet highly profitable) IB … harks back to the good bank-bad bank scenario that was floated for LEH, but they ran out of time to get it done …
oh, and btw, the partnership has supposedly been cut in half, only no one really knows that yet … it’s an open secret that at times the P is taken away from underperforming PMDs but they’re allowed to stay working there. This year appears to have been esp brutal. boo hoo
@33- paulson didn’t push the ipo through, CORZINE did. paulson and his buddies didn’t want the place to go public.
@41
Leave for……where?
Start a smaller IB……with what $$$?
I think the days of (number between 1 and 3) – (number between 3 and 5) Ex-Goldman (Bankers / Traders / Dingleberries) starting up new (Hedge Fund / PE Fund / Arby’s) are behind us for awhile
and @39, no, Corzine was thrown under the bus to get the IPO done, led by none other than Hank the Tank.
Imagine being a GS partner in 1999 — you get to realize the value that took 130 years to create … they left in DROVES soon after, many with $100MM++ who may have only been partners for a short time (2-4 years) … those that stayed of course saw it grow even higher …
it will be very interesting to see if they can get it done (and sell it back to the public in 2014)
@43 there are still a lot of people who would give these douches money
they’ll convince investors it was a “cyclical” thing that caused all the losses this year, nothing “they” did
Lehman was going private too ooop!
Take a cue as to where GS is going, bank Holding Co or not – This just changes who is charge of the liquidation.
You guys are half right — Corzine did push for the IPO, then got pushed out while Hank completed the deal (Jon’s last few months as the firm were sad window-dressing). Hank originally was against the idea but then got behind it all the way (go back and take a look at the photos of him on the NYSE floor that day.) Going private would be the perfect way to wrap up the IB cycle, and Hanky can even return to the firm starting on Jan 1! I can just see him doing his impression of Hannibal from the A-Team now…
@45
sad…but prob true
GS going private is a STUPID rumor. One cannot take government money and spend it such.
On a second thought, some have done just that.
Maybe, it is better they are split.
This is complete bullshit. GS is a bank holding company. No one’s going private. The people who start these rumors are idiots.
@51: it is not a rumor. It’s just Rothbort’s opinion as to what is going to happen. His quote: “I will say it again. Goldman Sachs (GS) goes private.” He later goes on to explain his rationale.
TGFD @ 28
Don’t be a moron. Please explain to me just how a GM fail would be more detrimental to the system than the Lehman fail. Spike up in unemployment, yes. Bankruptcies of some suppliers, probably. Systemic collapse, not likely.
Maybe some intricacies I’m missing, but you’re acting like Chicken Little.
“Using the term EPIC FAIL represents an EPIC FAIL.”
I think the rule books states. “If you change the spelling of “Fail” to “Phail” you are allowed one pass.”
Rawr.
@41
I can’t fault your logic at all, but to achieve any sort of scale, and to be able to adhere to whatever new regulatory burdens they’ll have, getting all the back-office stuff together to create a new firm has never been more difficult, IMHO. And with credit markets in bad shape, the normal means of up-front funding of big expenditures like new infrastructure is shut off – - after all, that’s what debt is normally for.
I’m not saying that this stuff is prohibitive, I’m just saying it takes time, and making a fast start would be extremely hard. Again, this assumes these guys would want to operate a new business that has decent scale.
But now that I’ve said all that, maybe they could accomplish that by some sort of roll-up of small, established firms, taking them private.
@53
You are brain dead.
Only choice is to nationalize.
@53
GM issued has issued so much commercial paper… I don’t know if it would be as detrimental as a Lehman failure but I would imagine it would be just as bad if not worse for money markets, pension funds and the like that hold that paper. Credit markets would refreeze as well and probably take another 3-4 months to thaw out.