Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Great. Very pleased to have concluding our 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference is Goldman Sachs from the company, David Solomon, Chairman and CEO. David, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. We only get two minutes? No, that's two o'clock.

Oh, it's two o'clock. Okay.

We've got three hours. I know.

I don't think we've got that.

Well, thanks for joining us. You know, I've covered Goldman for a long time now, and we've seen a significant shift since you became CEO and set out, you know, to strengthen kind of the core client franchise, you know, make Goldman a more integrated firm, improve returns, and just, you know, build a more durable earning space. Several years into that strategy, you know, what has changed most fondly at Goldman?

Well, I mean, I think, Jason, you, you know, you summed it up well. I mean, we're executing very well against the plan we developed back in late 2018 and 2019 to really focus on the growth of the firm and to get the client centricity and the client focus of the firm really aligned as True North, set out a bunch of objectives to grow the businesses, figure out how to operate the firm overall more effectively, and really kind of create a coordination ethos, which we call One Golden Sacks, to execute against that in as competent way as possible. And the results of it, we're now in the ninth year, the results of it are that we've significantly grown the firm. We've taken the revenue base from mid-30s, the expectations, we're in the 70s this year. We've created some leverage to grow the earnings more than that. And I think most importantly, we've made the overall mix of the business much more durable. And so we have a much broader, more diversified, more durable business. That doesn't mean in different environments there aren't certain parts of the business that can have in flow. But we're also given the nature of our franchises, the strengths of our franchises, when there are opportunities, companies like the current environment where there's more going on, we actually kind of grow share and expand our share and capture more of the upside. And I think one of the things that investors are going to see when we go through the inevitable cycles that we go through is that the base is much higher and much more durable and much broader than it was 10, 15 years ago. And it's a much more durable firm. And the whole, from a leadership perspective, as we're executing now, our focus is on growing the earnings of the firm. That is our focus. And I know that if we can continue to grow the revenues, you pick the base, okay? I go into investor meetings and everybody wants to debate, you know, are we over-earning this? Are we over-earning that? We're earning because there's an environment. Could there be an environment where you earn a little bit less? But you pick the base. You know, I think if you look back over the last eight years, I think we've grown, you know, the revenues based on what, you know, analyst estimates are for 2026. We've grown the revenues, you know, just less than 10%. over that period. And if we can grow the revenues 6%, I think we can deliver better than 10% earnings growth. And you can have no debate whatsoever about the multiple. Shareholders are going to be very happy. So this is a leadership team that's focused on continuing to expand the breadth of the business and grow the earnings, continue to make the overall business more durable. And we see room to continue to do that. And one of the reasons I'm so excited about the next three to five years is when you look at what's going on with technology, It's giving us an ability to reimagine operating processes and automate in ways that both give us better efficiency and therefore more margin in certain parts of the business and better returns, and in addition, give us more capacity to invest in growth where we've actually been constrained to invest in growth over the course of the last seven or eight years. And so I can't pick the environment. I have no idea what's going to happen environmentally three months from now, six months from now, a year from now. But I bet a lot that with a 5- to 10-year view, we can continue to grow the earnings of the firm meaningfully. And I also think we're in an environment based on this technology super cycle that we're going to see real productivity gains in the economy over the next 5- to 10 years. And Goldman Sachs is very correlated to that.

So I guess you said I get to pick the base. So I'll pick 2Q, 26 of the base, record results based on everything you talked about. I mean, over the next three to five years, I guess, where do you see kind of the biggest drivers for that continued growth?

Well, I think, look, we've got two big businesses, and I think we have opportunities to drive growth in both businesses. I think one of the things that surprised people is the ability for us to continue to grow our platform and our franchise in banking and markets. And we still see opportunities to do that. And we also see opportunities in banking and markets to operate the business differently and get more out of it, even at the same activity levels, given what technology is allowing us to do. And so we're excited about that. And then, you know, we've said publicly that we can grow our asset wealth management business high single digits. We're doing better than that. You know, we're now in a place where we've talked about, you know, our ability to drive 30 percent margins in that business and high teens returns. And the organic growth in that business is excellent. I know you're going to ask a little bit about asset wealth. We can save it for some of those questions, but you look at the scale of our platform, our fundraising capability, our flows, and we're performing very, very well in that business. We've also done a few interesting things inorganically that fill in gaps and accelerate some of that growth trajectory. So these are two world-class businesses, global banking and markets, asset and wealth management. We, I think, are the leader in global banking and markets. We are a top five player in asset wealth management the way it's structured, but we have a right to win in both businesses. We're a leader in both businesses. We have very, very effective scaled platforms in both businesses, and I think that just positions the firm very well, especially when you get out of quarter to quarter and kind of say, okay, what can they do the next three to five years? Okay, you've got to get out of quarter to quarter. We're focused on growing the franchise over the next three to five years.

Let's double click on a few of those items. starting, we could start with asset and wealth management, because that's certainly been a contributor to kind of this increased durability that you've talked about. Maybe just talk through kind of what differentiates this business and then go forward trajectory.

In terms of banking and markets?

Asset and wealth.

Oh, asset and wealth. You want to start with asset and wealth. Sure. So, you know, we had an interesting collection of businesses, but they weren't coordinated on a platform. And I think one of the most important things we've done as a leadership, and this was hard, and it created a bunch of noise, was we took a firm where people ran their individual businesses. And we said, if you bring these all together as a scaled platform, there's enormous scale advantage to it. So we took a merchant bank. We took a public side asset management business. We took a money market liquidity platform. We took a, for lack of a better term, a fund-to-fund kind of platform business. And then we took a wealth business and we put them all together. And so you wind up with a business now that is growing nicely, very nicely, is supervising $4 trillion of assets, has $2 trillion of wealth assets, I think is incredibly well positioned for the strong secular growth trends that we're going to see, or we are seeing, in ultra high net worth wealth. The acceleration of the amount of wealth in the world, and particularly kind of ultra wealthy people, and we are as well positioned as anybody to capture that space. And so the business has very, very good growth characteristics, But I think what our clients like is the scale of the platform and what we can offer is very holistic. Nobody can offer, you know, across the spectrum, top three liquidity firm, top five fixed income, you know, top 10 public equities player, top five alternatives player. Nobody can offer that. And so we have an incredible manufacturing facility and asset management that's very broad, very scaled and global. And then we've got a very, very, you know, strong client base that really appreciates the breadth of the platform.

One thing you've kept us busy with recently is just acquisition announcements for that segment. Maybe just kind of talk us through the rationale of recent acquisitions and maybe kind of early experiences with industry ventures and innovator.

So, you know, we've done five things strategically in asset and wealth management for acquisitions and a partnership with T. Rowe Price. You know, all of these things are meaningful, meaning they're having positive impact on the business. I would say none of these are individually significant. But we have gaps. I talk about the scale platform. We have gaps. And, you know, we've been looking very, very carefully for places where there are things that can fill the gaps. And all these things, you know, fit that. The partnership with T.O. Price was designed to give us distribution access into retirement. Because I think retirement is going to be increasingly important, and especially over time, I do think there will be more retirement participation in alts. And we have a very, very good manufacturing capability in alts. And so having a partnership with that retirement distribution channel was important. With industry ventures, we serve the venture community and our banking business enormously. But here was a leading player that was seeding this early-round venture stuff in a very, very meaningful way, had an incredible network. and it was a spot that we weren't playing, but the synergies of seeing all this stuff earlier inside Goldman Sachs is really terrific. And the early read on having Hans Swilden and his team at the firm has been fantastic, both by the clients and also the product offerings that we're having for our clients. And so that feels very good. And I'd highlight something in that that I think is important with all of these. One of the things that happens with these kinds of acquisitions is they're talent acquisitions for Goldman Sachs. So all of these are small entrepreneurial businesses where the principal that started the business has grown their business, and they're basically making the decision that they want to do what they're doing on our platform because they think by doing it on our platform, they have more room to run than they would if they did it independently. And so this has brought some really interesting talent into the firm. With respect to Innovator and Neos, you know, if you look back, we weren't top 50 in ETFs. We were late, in my opinion, in getting going in active ETFs. And so now we've got, depending on how you look at a top six, seven, eight position, in active ETFs, you know, which is where obviously our firm wants to focus. The early results in terms of fundraising have been excellent. Here again, we got some very, very good talent in both those businesses that were really excited about doing what they do on our platform. And so we became a scaled player in active ETFs with two relatively small acquisitions and have very, very good growth trajectory on those platforms based on the early returns. And then we've said that real estate and infrastructure are two places on the alternative side where we feel like there's more opportunity for us to scale. And so the last acquisition, triple net lease acquisition, was an opportunity to further broaden or accelerate some of what we want to do in real estate because that's a place that we don't feel that we're scaled. And this is a little piece, but we're still not scaled in real estate. So all of them, they add to places where we're not scaled, and they can accelerate some of that growth. They bring talent. We're not going to do it if we don't really like the talent, and the talent doesn't really want to be a part of Goldman Sachs. And, you know, these are not complicated things to integrate because you're buying small teams of people that have very, very specific talents that are additive to the firm. And it's a good strategy. Are we going to do some more? There's some other obvious gaps we have where if we can find the right things, we do them. But this is kind of a low-risk strategy to accelerate the pace of growth.

Got it. Maybe talk a little bit about wealth management. You mentioned $2 trillion in total client assets across ultra-high net worth franchise. You're also expanding GSAM's capabilities to third-party wealth channels. Just what's underpinning the growth you're seeing across wealth?

I mean, there is just so much wealth expanding and the opportunity to provide a full-service offering to people. People want a very high-touch full-service offering, and we offer that. And our brand, our capabilities. Now, the issue with this business is it scales with people. This is not a business that scales with technology. And one of the reasons I'm excited with some of the flexibility we have given the process reimagining is it's allowing us to accelerate the footprint of wealth advisors we have around the world in a very, very focused way, and that we know how to grow the footprint of wealth advisors and add to the business. Third-party wealth is a great, great opportunity for us. You know, we've never had privity with, you know, retail clients broadly, but we have a great breadth of platform that the third-party distributors find very, very attractive. And so we've found our ability to build partnerships with those third-party distributors has been powerful, and that creates a very broad distribution channel for us given our manufacturing capability.

And then maybe alternatives, obviously a key growth driver for AWM, a leading player, $700 billion in total alternative assets. Just what differentiates Goldman platform, especially in this market?

Well, with all these things we're talking about, one of the things that I don't think should be lost is performance, performance, performance, performance. You are managing money for people, and they want performance. And we've got a very good performance track record over long periods of time across everything that we're talking about. You know, in alternatives, we have a really extraordinary offering, and we also have incredible relationships, and we have the ability, when you get to the big institutional capital allocators, to customize offerings for them. And so one of the things that I think is making us very, very effective with a large capital allocator is we're just not out pitching a fund. We're basically trying to understand how they want to put capital work over a significant period of time, creating partnerships and customizing, you know, what they need, which I think is very powerful. And look, you look at our, you know, our fundraising, we've thrown out there on a fundraising perspective, 75 to 100 billion of volts fundraising a year. You know, this year we're going to do better than 125. And as you know, you know, through the two quarters, you know, we were awfully close to 100. So, you know, that's very, very powerful. It's also powerful because I think this year we're kind of running third when you look at that landscape in terms of our fundraising capability, and that's in the broadest definition. If you actually look at pure alts, we're doing better than that. So the firm's very well positioned in this space. I still believe in the long-term secular growth of these private capital products. There have been some bumps and some noise around it, but one of the things that's been interesting, look at the credit, the institutional credit, private credit fundraising. you know we did last quarter you know institutions with all the noise kind of look and say okay this is actually an attractive time to be deploying and so where they go they go to platforms that are broad with experience over a long period of time they trust and so you know we're obviously doing very well in that context with the institutions i guess just out of curiosity record fundraising you know where are you seeing the most interest there's a lot of interest in credit i mean there's a lot of interest in credit institutional credit um you know we've seen a lot of interest in a variety of the kind of structured products we have in XIG, but credit is really the place where I thought there was differentiation last quarter.

I guess maybe sticking with the durability theme, financing is another area that's seen strong growth. I think 2Q is a record for both equities and thick financing revenues. Where do we go from here?

Well, I think you've got to think about these financing revenues. And I certainly would be emphatic, the growth's not going to be a straight line because it's just correlated to market activity and market cap. And so if you had a drawdown on the market for a period of time, you would see a softening in that activity for a period of time. But if you believe over the next 10 years, the market cap of the U.S. and the market cap of the world is going to compound at some rate, you're going to see the availability for us to finance our clients is going to compound at some rate. And so we're very focused on risk management. We're very focused on how we package and deliver this. But these are very attractive, durable businesses for someone that's got a scaled platform and is a leader. And I actually think there's going to be more and more pricing power over time, because at the end of the day, there are only a handful of firms that actually have the capacity to serve clients at the scale they need to be served.

I guess one thing we're trying to get our arms around is just, you know, this impact of AI driving significant capital formation, you know, areas like compute, data center infrastructure. Maybe just talk us through the opportunity set and how you help your clients finance growth while obviously, you know, maintaining discipline with risk, structure, distribution.

I mean, everything, you know, there are limits to everything. And you also, when you step back and you look at the firm, the firm's doing a lot of financing on a lot of things. And while all the attention would be toward AI financing, and I'm not going to say that AI financing is not creating tailwinds in certain parts of our business, AI financing is not driving all the financing activity we're doing. There's a lot of financing going on on a lot of different things all over the world. But with respect to AI financing, if everyone is right and the build-out of the compute capability in the next five years is going to take $8 trillion, there's going to be a lot of financing to do that. Now, I'm not sure it's going to be a straight line. I'm not sure everybody's estimating at the end of the day the right capital needs, that they've got the right pricing models. But I do think there's going to be a lot of demand and there's going to be a lot of needs. And this is something we're really good at. And we also sit in a very, very unique position because we're not just a capital provider as an asset manager the way somebody like Apollo or BlackRock would be. We are that, you know, the same way they are. But in addition, we're an advisor, we're a distributor, we're an underwriter. And so we've got a capacity to see these things and get in the middle of these things. And that's what our CSG effort is all about. It really puts us in the center of sourcing for these things in a way we can be very selective, very, very focused, always with a view toward risk management, very, very focused. Things I'm focused on, we all know when you're looking at where the underlying credit risk is, we know what a real investment-grade offtake agreement looks like. And then we also know when people are doing structured things that are getting investment-grade ratings, where fundamentally the risk is not the same as true investment-grade risk. That's something we've seen before in history. And so we're watching that stuff very carefully. It's not at a scale at the moment that I'm overly concerned, but whenever you have a site like this, excess is developed, and one of our jobs is to be very smart, to look around corners, be very prudent in how we set limits and create risks and how we distribute what we hold. I think we're good at it. I'm sure we'll have bumps like everybody else when there's a recalibration. But at the moment, there's certainly a lot of opportunity.

I guess as you kind of capture this opportunity, just how do you ensure that it remains consistent with your kind of risk appetite and at the same time you can support clients that usually come to you?

You know, it's a dialogue. I mean, it's a dialogue. There are things that people want us to do that we won't do. There are things where we think we understand them and understand the collateral and understand, you know, the structure better, and, you know, we lean in. I mean, that's fundamentally adjacent to what our business is. It's trying to pick the winners. It's trying to avoid more of the losers. It's trying to get your clients the best product that you can. But that's what we do.

And maybe shifting gears to the investment bank, I think every year you're number one in M&A. The gap to number two is consistently fairly wide and even widening. I think it's the widest it's ever been in my recollection at the moment. Impressive. I guess that gives you unique insights in terms of what's happening. Obviously, it feels like almost a record year. But what are you hearing from clients and what's your outlook from here?

Our leadership position, I don't think, gives us unique insights. If you're in the M&A business, it's quite apparent that after being in an environment where whatever the question was, the regulatory answer was no, we're now in an environment, whatever the question is, the regulatory answer is maybe. And so if you're running a platform, find me a business where scale advantage doesn't matter. Scale advantage matters so much in all businesses. People that have leadership positions in businesses are looking for consolidation and an ability to extend their scale advantages, and we're in a regulatory environment where they can. The result of that is CEOs are very, very front-footed about trying to take advantage of scale advantages, and that's therefore leading to much, much more strategic M&A. Sponsor business has actually been very, very quiet. And I do think at some point that will turn on. And so that's upside potentially when we get to that point. I still think you have an imbalance in kind of where the market is and a lot of the marks that a bunch of these 2020, 2021 vintage funds have. That will sort itself out at some time. But this is being driven by strategic activity by corporates. And the other thing I'm hearing from corporates, which is true and I think is interesting, is, you know, corporate CEO confidence is pretty high. And I think one of the things that it's important to kind of step back and reflect on is, you know, why is that? Okay, interest rates are kind of 100 basis points higher than they were at the beginning of the year. Inflation is higher than it was at the beginning of the year. Oil is higher than it was at the beginning of the year. If I told you at the beginning of the year we were going to have those three characteristics, you wouldn't have said, well, that we'd expect higher CEO confidence. But what I think is underpinning that, look at earnings growth. Look at earnings growth in the S&P. Look at earnings growth. If you go back to 2025 and look at 2026 earnings growth, okay, I think earnings growth now predicted for 2026 in the S&P is 30% higher than people expected it to be in 2026 at the beginning of 2025. And 2027 earnings growth now, for 2027, the market's expecting 15%. So CEOs feel that. CEOs feel like they can really drive earnings at the moment. They've got tailwinds toward that. that creates a level of confidence in the context of what they want to do. So what I'm hearing from clients, I feel pretty good. I see opportunities to continue to drive earnings in my business. Now's the time to be aggressive, and you're seeing that in M&A activity and capital markets activity.

You mentioned sponsors inevitably coming back. I feel like it's something we've been waiting for for a while. Yeah, we've been waiting. I think I sat on the stage two years ago and said, I think it's coming. Not that wrong. Any particular catalyst or, you know, what's the holdup?

It's just time. And, look, what the holdup is is the incentive system doesn't incentivize it, you know, to move. You know, the sponsors have an enormous option on waiting. And so, you know, I think it will take some time. Unfortunately, that slows down the fundraising process for a lot of those firms. And so, ultimately, you know, it will push through. You know, I'm hearing more and more sponsors talking about the fact they want to accelerate stuff, they want to get stuff to market, they want to move, because I understand the capital velocity for their businesses is a little bit stalled for most of them, not all, there are exceptions, for most if they don't create velocity. But it's been slower than I expected. I've been wrong. I would have thought it would have been just forced to come back at this point. But I'd also say the LPs are probably a little bit complicit, and that the LPs publicly say we want to see more velocity, But I think privately, they're like, we'll wait. And so I think it's a complicated cocktail.

You know, we've had a bunch of your peers present at this conference this week, got some guidance points in the third quarter. Anything you'd like investors to keep in mind when they think about your near-term performance?

Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, the first thing I'd just say is, you know, the activity levels have been very high and the firms have been very active. I saw, you know, the range of comments people made. And what I'd say is our equity business continues to be very strong on a relative basis. FIC has been a little bit softer on a relative basis, but there's still a few weeks left in September. And so we'll see where that balance is out. But the overall level of activities have been very, very high. There are three things that I guess I would point investors to that are more idiosyncratic. One is I would tell investors that on our investments line to expect a much more muted third quarter after there was significant activity in the second quarter. Next, I would point to non-comp operating expenses because of the nature of activity and the fact that there's been very good activity. Our transaction expenses are therefore running higher. In addition, we've accelerated some tech investments. And then the third thing is we had an opportunity to pull forward in a very, very tax-efficient way a significant number of years of charitable giving, and we're choosing to do that. And so the combination of those three things, I think investors should expect our non-comp expenses to run more than $500 million higher sequentially. And then lastly, our loan portfolio is in good shape. It's performing well. But we had a couple of idiosyncratic things that would lead provisions to be slightly higher this quarter than they were in the same quarter last year. Those are three things I would point to.

Okay. So equity is very strong. When you say relative softness, relative to?

Relative to equities.

Relative to equities.

And also relative to FIC in some other quarters, but still good activity.

Any particular areas that you'd want to call out as being?

Nope, I don't want to call out anything more than I just called out. By the way, I think that's probably more than I've ever called out before an earnings call ever in this real world. So we're trying something new with you, Jason. We'll see whether it's effective or not.

Maybe I shouldn't push you any further.

I don't think you should. I mean, you can. I mean, you can push me as much as you want, but I'm a pretty disciplined guy. I don't say much that I don't intend to say.

I'll try one more. You mentioned a few idiosyncratic credits. Anything you should watch?

Don't overread that. The reason I'm just trying to provide guidance so we can help analysts with our provisions. Our provisions are going to run slightly higher than they ran in this quarter last year. But there's nothing that's going on. The overall performance of the loan portfolio continues to be very good.

Fair enough. maybe shift gears and talk about 1GS 3.0, something you launched last year, a multi-year effort to drive a new operating model what's the purpose of that and how is it driving future productivity scale?

1GS, and you know this, we've talked a lot about this it started as an attempt to get us really focused on our largest clients, kind of became an operating ethos for really making the client experience really seamless and unique. We then expanded it to what we called 1GS 2.0, where we said, okay, let's get that really going across the firm instead of just in banking and markets and really thinking about how asset and wealth management and global banking and markets can really do better collectively. And that was 2.0. And then 3.0 is how do we really think about the operating processes in a firm that deliver better results for clients and also lever our people. And this is a little bit about using technology to remake certain operating capabilities. All these things, we continue to focus on all these things. I just had a management off-site that I know you're aware of where we talked about 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, what kind of the KPIs are. Are we on track on all the KPIs? And when we focus on this, it's part of the operating ethos of really making sure the client experience with the firm and our ability to serve clients just gets better and better and better. And I think the lens we use is this gives us a way to talk to the firm about things that we can do to just keep raising the bar, just keep raising the bar. How do we do a little bit better? How do we keep doing a little bit better? And if you do that, I think your relative performance over time is good. And so we're very, very focused on that.

I guess we started out the discussion about this increasing just earning capacity of the firm. We talked about increasing the durability of those earnings. And as a result, right, you're just throwing off more and more capital. Just how do you think about allocating that capital between organic investments, acquisitions, you know, returning capital to shareholders, and, you know, in this evolving regulatory landscape, how do we just think about overall capital?

Yeah, well, I mean, you make a very, very good point, which is something, you know, we've wrestled with. We generate an enormous amount of capital every year. You know, first and foremost, if there are opportunities to deploy that capital into the business to serve our clients and produce a creative returns. That is what we'd like to do. That's what we want to do. That is our first priority. If we can't, you know, find ways to do that, we're going to get that capital back to shareholders. Now, with respect to inorganic activity, you know, we, if you think about our capital generation in any one year, you know, we have the ability in any one year to generate, you know, enough capital so that if we decide to do something inorganic, even if we decided to do something that was more significant than the kinds of things we're doing. We have the capital capacity to do that. And so, you know, we feel first and foremost, are there opportunities to serve clients, get the capital deployed in the business, add accretive returns, grow earnings of the firm? That's what we want to do. But if we don't see opportunities immediately, we're going to be very nimble and get capital back. You know, you know, we've taken our dividend from, you know, 80 cents a quarter to $5. We've been very committed to growing the dividend. And, you know, in addition, you know, we've been returning a reasonable amount of capital. And, you know, my point is, you know, you can have all sorts of debates about, you know, what the stock price is and what you're doing. But if you don't see opportunities, you're better to get it back. It helps returns the next year, and you generate more capital. And if you see the opportunities, you'll put it in the business. So we're pretty disciplined about that. And we're not smart enough to pick the ups and downs of the otherwise. we're going to get that capital back to shareholders.

And I guess maybe as a follow-up to that, you know, we talked about the business mix becoming more durable, less balance sheet intensive. You know, is the ability to kind of maybe move returns structurally higher? I know you talked about this 14% to 60% ROE at your investment a couple years back. You've been obviously running well above that. You know, is that something you revisit? How do you think about that?

Well, I think it's very important to remember the journey. the firm's returns are structurally meaningfully higher than anybody thought they would be. You know, when you go back, I remember just two years ago, you know, on earnings calls, you know, investors asking, and we were very, very confident, you know, can you get to your returns targets? And I was very, very confident we could. You know, I've always felt that we had a business structurally that we were evolving that through the cycle could produce mid-team returns. And I just remind everybody, we're talking about ROE, because that's just the way we look at it, not, you know, R-O-T-E. But we've obviously, and I said this a couple of earnings calls ago, we're in an environment where I think we're going to earn ahead of our targets. I think we're continuing to grow the earnings and make structural changes to the firm that are quite attractive and quite, you know, accretive for shareholders. If over time we have confidence that the through-the-cycle returns are going to be consistently higher, we'll address it. But we're not at that point now. At this point, we're in an environment where we're earning higher than the target. But we've significantly uplifted the base returns of the firm.

Fair. Maybe to close this out, what do you think the market still underappreciates about Goldman Sachs story, and what should investors feel excited about as we look forward?

Well, I think investors, I mean, I've said it, and I'll say it again. I think investors should be excited the same way I am about the fact that, you know, when I get out of the quarter to quarter and I look at the next five years, given what's going on in the world, given the way Goldman Sachs is positioned, given the nature of our businesses, our ability to grow the firm and grow the earnings of the firm and continue to make the firm more durable, I'm hugely confident in our ability to do that. Now, it won't be a straight line, and things are going to happen that none of us expect. But if you stop thinking about the moment and start thinking about the next five years, next 10 years, really, really exciting. Then you add on with technology the ability to remake processes and create more operating leverage in the business. I've never seen anything like this in my whole career, so I'm super excited about that too. So I can't predict the environment. The environment will ebb and flow, but there are significant structural tailwinds that should allow us, with a five- to ten-year view, to continue to meaningfully grow the earnings of Goldman Sachs, as we have over the last eight years.

Great. On that note, please join me in thanking David for his time today.

Thank you, Jason.

September 13th, 14th, and 15th, 2027, right back here.