Do we like them?

Do we like Goldman Sachs?

Wall Street investment bank offering advisory, trading, asset management and banking; based in New York.

Our score: 4 out of 10. Not for us. Its record includes a record bribery settlement and repeated regulatory fines, and it keeps financing fossil fuels despite its climate pledges.

Goldman is one of Wall Street's oldest and most prestigious banks, and it's listed on the NYSE. David Solomon has been chairman and CEO since 2018. In October 2026 he said there was no succession timeline, despite reports he could step down as early as next year. COO John Waldron is seen as the likely successor.

The big stain is 1MDB, the Malaysian state fund. The US Justice Department accused Goldman and others of defrauding it of $2.7bn, and Goldman agreed to a record $2.9bn judgment. Goldman also settled with Malaysia for $3.9bn. It has said that former Malaysian officials lied to it about where the bond money would go.

Bloomberg noted that Goldman's investment-banking group, then led by Solomon, collected an unusually high $600m from the bond sales. Malaysia's finance ministry said the settlement was Goldman's acknowledgment of misconduct by two former employees. After the US deal, the bank said it would rescind $174m in pay from top leadership and try to claw back $67m from former executives.

The smaller fines keep coming. In 2025, per Reuters, Goldman paid $1.45m to settle a US regulator's claims that it misreported data on billions of trades, without admitting or denying wrongdoing. FINRA also fined it $250,000 over an IPO conflict-of-interest issue and unregistered staff doing banking work.

On climate, Goldman pledged net zero by 2050 for its financing. In 2025 the Sierra Club, citing the Banking on Climate Chaos report, said the bank put $145bn into fossil fuels over seven years. With a big scandal, repeated fines and a patchy climate record, we land at 3.5 out of 10.