No Ferraris? Goldman Traders Worry

Aug. 10, 2007 — -- The sleek interior of one of the world's biggest investment banks reverberated with tension this morning. No business casual here. Suits and ties. It was not a day to take off early for the Hamptons.

The financial district office of the Goldman Sachs asset management group, which runs the bank's hedge funds, was busy Friday morning with anxious traders racing down the hallways and hush-hush meetings hashing out strategies to stem losses in their stock holdings.

At stake: $40 billion in assets. And more than likely talk about the government's decision to investigate whether the country's major financial institutions are losing more money than they're letting on.

It's been a tough week for the massively successful firm -- which earned a record $9.34 billion last year -- and its bonus-hungry employees, as the stock market began to reel from trouble in the home loan market and the ongoing credit crunch.

The anxious traders have plenty of reasons to sweat, 622,000 reasons, to be exact. That was the average bonus in dollars awarded to the firm's employees last year, from high-level executives to lowly mail-room employees.

Of course, most of the top traders' bonuses were in the seven figures, allowing them to pump money into the economy by snapping up penthouse apartments, luxury cars and fancy yachts. And that's just one niche where the market's woes could affect retail sales – if traders get smaller bonuses, they would have less to spend on costly goods.

On Tuesday, Goldman Sachs had to shoot down rumors that it was liquidating its Global Alpha hedge fund, which fell 12 percent in two weeks and was reportedly selling stock in Italian automaker Fiat, aerospace company EADS and German auto parts supplier Continental.

The fund's losses hurt the firm's first-quarter results as fund management incentive fees for the group fell 78 percent to $23 million from $105 million a year earlier, according to the published reports.

As a result, the fund has been making changes, moving Ranaan Argus, the head of Goldman's equity prop trading desk, to asset management, where he will start the firm's first long-short hedge fund.