The Goldman Sachs Foundation's Torrid 2008

Goldman Sachs (GS) has provided Reuters with a copy of the Goldman Sachs Foundation’s 2008 tax return. Why the NYT didn’t just put it online I have no idea, but in any case here it is, all 297 pages of it.

The bottom line is that the Goldman Sachs Foundation did very badly in 2008. Here’s the way it’s all summed up:

The fund started the year with $269 million in assets, and ended with $161 million. The amount it made in charitable disbursements was $22 million (that’s the last number on line 25 of the first page), which means that the charitable disbursements aside, the fund managed to drop by $85 million. That’s 32% of the amount it started the year with, and almost four times the amount of money it actually gave to charity.

The big losses are a capital loss of $15 million on the sale of assets, and a whopping $75 million unrealized loss on investments. And then, just for good measure, we find out on page 68 of the PDF that the foundation paid Goldman Sachs Asset Management $3,864,540 for “investment management”. Gee, thanks for the service, guys.

If the Goldman Sachs Foundation put all its money in cash, earning 0%, and wrote checks over the course of the year totalling $100 million, it would have done better than this. Instead, it managed to give away less than a quarter of that, to recipients like the Foundation for Teaching Economics ($333,333) and $2,550,000 to the Institute of International Education “to support the expansion and enhancement of the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program in building a strong platform for the Program’s 10th anniversary activities in 2010.”

The Goldman Sachs Foundation also spent $230,000 on various Davos-related donations, in the form of gifts to the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and the World Economic Forum itself.

Maybe that’s what Lloyd Blankfein had in mind when he talked about doing God’s work.

Author's Disclosures: None

Comments

[prairiedog555:]

Anything related to GS is suspect. They are the ultimate Global crime syndicate. I know this may sound paranoid but in light of the revelations of GS financial and commodity trading manipulations and shareholder thievery going back to pre-1900 I would not have anything to do with them in any fashion.

Nov 13 09:20 AM

[Ferdinand E...:]

That's funny. I thought that this was a good year for GS, and now I read that some BS foundation they operate lost a few million. TS, as we used to say in Uncle Sam's army, but one thing is certain: I'm not going to waste precious energy bad-mouthing them. Anybody who passes out money (via the Foundation for Teaching Economics) to the mediocrities languishing in certain universities will eventually get what they deserve.

Nov 13 09:25 AM

[Alan Young:]

This is incredibly cynical. They"advise" the foundation to make a trade, take the opposite side of the trade, take the profit, leave the foundation with the loss, AND collect the advisory fee. Now we know how they were able to make profitable trades EVERY DAY.

It would be too much to expect Treasury to investigate this and at least revoke the tax exemption, but it sure stinks.

Thanks, Felix, for bringing this to light.

Nov 13 11:32 AM

[Kinabalu:]

But LLoyd Blankfein says they're "doing God's work".

Nov 14 01:06 AM