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 2:00 P.M.. Oh, it's 2:00 P.M. We got three hours. Don't think we've got that. Well, thanks for joining us. I've covered Goldman for a long time now, and we've seen a significant shift since you became CEO and set out to strengthen the core client franchise, make Goldman a more integrated firm, improve returns, and just build a more durable earnings base. Several years into that strategy, what has changed most fundamentally at Goldman? I think, Jason, you summed it up well. 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 create a coordination ethos, which we call One Goldman Sachs, to execute against that in as competent way as possible. 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-$30 billion range, the expectations, we're in the $70 billion range this year. We've created some leverage to grow the earnings more than that. I think most importantly, we've made the overall mix of the business much more durable. 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 ebb and flow, but we're also given the nature of our franchises, the strengths of our franchises, when there are opportunities, like the current environment where there's more going on, we actually grow share and expand our share and capture more of the upside. 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. It's a much more durable firm. From a leadership perspective, as we're executing now, our focus is on growing the earnings of the firm. That is our focus. I know that if we can continue to grow the revenues, you pick the base. I go into investor meetings, and everybody wants to debate, 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? Of course. But you pick the base. I think if you look back over the last eight years, I think we've grown the revenues based on what analyst estimates are for 2026. We've grown the revenues just less than 10% over that period. If we can grow the revenues 6%, I think we can deliver better than 10% earnings growth. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I guess you said I get to pick the base. We'll pick 2Q 2026 as the base. Record results base and everything you talked about. Over the next three to five years, I guess, where do you see kind of the biggest drivers for that continued growth? 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 surprise people is the ability for us to continue to grow our platform and our franchise in Banking & Markets. We still see opportunities to do that. We also see opportunities in Banking & Markets to operate the business differently and get more out of it, even at the same activity levels, given what technology's allowing us to do. We're excited about that. We've said publicly that we can grow our Asset & Wealth Management business high single-digits. We're doing better than that. We're now in a place where we've talked about our ability to drive 30% margins in that business and high teens returns. 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. You look at the scale of our platform, our fundraising capability, our flows. We're performing 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. These are two world-class businesses, Global Banking & Markets, Asset & Wealth Management. We, I think, are the leader in Global Banking & 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 scale 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? Y ou 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. We could start with Asset & Wealth Management because that's certainly been a contributor to this increased durability that you've talked about. Maybe just talk through what differentiates this business in the go-forward trajectory. In terms of Banking & Markets? Asset & Wealth. You want to start with Asset & Wealth? Sure. We had an interesting collection of businesses, but they weren't coordinated on a platform. 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. We took a merchant bank, we took a public side asset management business. We took a money market liquidity platform. We took, for lack of a better term, a fund to funds kind of platform business, and then we took a wealth business and we put them all together. 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. 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 across the spectrum, top three liquidity firm, top five fixed income, top 10 public equities player, top five alternatives player. Nobody can offer that. We have an incredible manufacturing facility and asset management that's very broad, very scaled, and global. We've got a very 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 talk us through the rationale of recent acquisitions and maybe early experiences with Industry Ventures and Innovator Capital Management. We've done five things strategically in Asset & Wealth Management, four acquisitions and a partnership with T. Rowe Price. 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 talked about the scaled platform. We have gaps. And we've been looking very carefully for places where there are things that can fill the gaps. And all these things fit that. The partnership with T. Rowe Price was designed to give us distribution access into retirement, because I think retirement's going to be increasingly important. And especially over time, I do think there'll be more retirement participation in alts. And we have a very good manufacturing capability in alts. 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 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. The early read on having Hans Swildens 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. 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. 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. This has brought some really interesting talent into the firm. With respect to Innovator Capital Management and NEOS, if you look back, we weren't top 50 in ETFs. We were late, in my opinion, in getting going in active ETFs. Now, we've got, depending on how you look at it, top six, seven, eight position in active ETFs, 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 good talent in both those businesses that we're really excited about doing what they do on our platform. We became a scaled player in active ETFs with two relatively small acquisitions and have very good growth trajectory on those platforms based on the early returns. 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. 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. This is a little piece, but we're still not scaled in real estate. 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. These are not complicated things to integrate because you're buying small teams of people that have very specific talents that are additive to the firm. It's a good strategy. Are we going to do some more? Probably. 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. They are also expanding Goldman Sachs Asset Management's capabilities to third-party wealth channels. Just what is underpinning the growth you are seeing across wealth? 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. Our brand, our capabilities. Now, the issue with this business is it scales with people. This is not a business that scales with technology. One of the reasons I am excited with some of the flexibility we have given the process reimagining, is it is allowing us to accelerate the footprint of wealth advisors we have around the world in a very focused way. We know how to grow the footprint of wealth advisors and add to the business. Third-party wealth is a great opportunity for us. We have never had privity with retail clients broadly, but we have a great breadth of platform that the third-party distributors find very attractive. We have found our ability to build partnerships with those third-party distributors has been powerful. That creates a very broad distribution channel for us given our manufacturing capabilities. Then maybe alternatives, obviously a key growth driver for AWM, a leading player, $700 billion in total alternative assets. Just what differentiates Goldman Sachs platform, especially in this market? Well, with all these things we are talking about, one of the things that I don't think should be lost is 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 are talking about. 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. One of the things that I think is making us very effective with a large capital allocators, we are just not out pitching a fund. We are basically trying to understand how they want to put capital work over a significant period of time, creating partnerships and customizing what they need, which I think is very powerful. Look, you look at our fundraising. We've thrown out there on a fundraising perspective, $75 billion-$100 billion of alts fundraising a year. This year we are going to do better than $125 billion. As you know, through the two quarters, we were awfully close to $100 billion. That's very powerful. It's also powerful because I think this year we are kind of running third when you look at that landscape in terms of our fundraising capability. That's in the broadest definition. If you actually look at pure alts, we are 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 institutional credit, private credit fundraising we did last quarter. Institutions with all the noise kind of look and say, okay, this is actually an attractive time to be deploying. Where they go, they go to platforms that are broad with experience over a long period of time they trust. So we are obviously doing very well in that context with the institutions. I guess just out of curiosity, record fundraising, where are you seeing the most interest? There's a lot of interest in credit. There's a lot of interest in credit, institutional credit. We've seen a lot of interest in a variety of the 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 FICC financing revenues. Where do we go from here? Well, I think you've got to think about these financing revenues. 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. If you had a drawdown in 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. 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. 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 this impact of AI driving significant capital formation, areas like compute, data center infrastructure. Maybe just talk us through the opportunity set and how you help your clients finance growth while obviously maintaining discipline with risk structure, distribution. Sure. There are limits to everything. When you step back and you look at the firm, the firm's doing a lot of financing on a lot of things. While all the attention would be toward AI financing, 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 in 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 $1 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. This is something we're really good at. We also sit in a 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, the same way they are. But in addition, we're an advisor, we're a distributor, we're an underwriter, 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 focused, always with a view toward risk management. 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. 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. 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 cycle like this, excesses develop, 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 in 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? 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 the structure better, and we lean in. That's fundamentally, Jason, 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. Got it. And maybe shifting gears to the investment bank. I think every year you're almost 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. Just what are you hearing from clients and what's your outlook from here? Sure. 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. 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 front-footed about trying to take advantage of scale advantages, and that's therefore leading to much more strategic M&A. Sponsor business has actually been very quiet, and I do think at some point that will turn on. 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 on a lot of the marks that a bunch of these 2020, 2021 vintage funds have. That will sort itself out at some time. This is being driven by strategic activity by corporates. The other thing I'm hearing from corporates, which is true and I think is interesting, is corporate CEO confidence is pretty high. I think one of the things that it's important to kind of step back and reflect on is, why is that? 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. 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, 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. 2027 earnings growth now for 2027, the market's expecting 15%. 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. 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. We've been waiting. I think I sat on this stage a few years ago and said, I think it's coming. Not that wrong. Any particular catalyst or what's the hold-up? It's just time. Look, what the hold-up is the incentive system doesn't incentivize it to move. The sponsors have an enormous option on waiting. I think it'll take some time. Unfortunately, that slows down the fundraising process for a lot of those firms. Ultimately, it will push through. 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 they 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. It's been slower than I expected. I've been wrong. I would've thought it would've been just forced to come back at this point. I'd also say the LPs are probably a little bit complicit in that the LPs publicly say we want to see more velocity, but I think privately they're like, we'll wait. I think it's a complicated cocktail. Got it. 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? Sure. The first thing I'd just say is that the activity levels have been very high, and the firms have been very active. I saw the range of comments people made. And what I'd say is our equities business continues to be very strong on a relative basis. FICC 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 balances out. But the overall level of activities have been 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 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. So those are three things I would point to. So equity is very strong. FICC, when you say relative softness, relative to? Relative to equities. Relative to equities. Also, relative to FICC 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 the history of the 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. 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? No. 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 OneGS 3.0, something you launched last year. A multi-year effort to drive the new operating model. Just what is the purpose of that, and how is it driving future productivity scale? One GS, and you know this, we have talked a lot about this, Jason. It started as an attempt to get us really focused on our largest clients. It kind of became an operating ethos for really making the client experience really seamless and unique. We then expanded it to what we called One GS 2.0, where we said, okay, let's get that really going across the firm instead of just in Banking & Markets, and really thinking about how Asset & Wealth Management and Global Banking & Markets can really do better collectively. And that was 2.0. 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. We continue to focus on all these things. I just had a management offsite that I know you are aware of, where we talked about 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, w hat kind of the KPIs are. Are we on track on all the KPIs? And when we focus on this, it is 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 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. 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. We are 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, you are just throwing off more and more capital. Just how do you think about allocating that capital between organic investments, acquisitions, returning capital to shareholders? In this evolving regulatory landscape, how do we just think about overall capital? You make a very good point, which is something we've wrestled with. We generate an enormous amount of capital every year. First and foremost, if there are opportunities to deploy that capital into the business to serve our clients and produce accretive returns, that is what we'd like to do. That is what we want to do. That is our first priority. If we can't find ways to do that, we're going to get that capital back to shareholders. Now, with respect to inorganic activity, if you think about our capital generation in any one year, we have the ability in any one year to generate 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. We feel first and foremost, are there opportunities to serve clients, get the capital deployed in the business at 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 we've taken our dividend from $0.80 a quarter to $2.50. We've been very committed to growing the dividend. In addition, we've been returning a reasonable amount of capital. My point is, you can have all sorts of debates about 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. If you see the opportunities, you'll put it in the business. We're pretty disciplined about that. We're not smart enough to pick the ups and downs or the otherwise. We're going to get that capital back to shareholders. I guess maybe as a follow-up to that, we talked about the business mix becoming more durable, less balance sheet intensive. Is the ability to kind of maybe move returns structurally higher? I know you talked about this 14%-16% ROE at your Investor Day a couple of years back. You've been obviously running well above that. 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. When you go back, I remember just two years ago on earnings calls, investors asking, and we were very confident, can you get to your returns targets? And I was very confident we could. I've always felt that we had a business structurally that we were evolving that through the cycle could produce mid-teens returns. I just remind everybody, we're talking about ROE because that's just the way we look at it, not ROTE. 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 accretive for shareholders. If over time we have confidence that 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've said it, and so I'll say it again, I think investors should be excited the same way I am about the fact that when I get out of the quarter- to-qu arter 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 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, and so I'm super excited about that too. I can't predict the environment. The environment will ebb and flow, but there are significant structural tailwinds that should allow us, with a 5- to 10-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. Okay.