Goldman Lost 50 Partners Last Year

Goldman Sachs lost 50 partners in 2011, one of the biggest annual losses of senior executives in its 13 years as a publicly traded company.

Goldman, which is on track next week to report weak fourth-quarter and year-end results, has seen a number of prominent retirements in recent weeks, including Edward K. Eisler and David B. Heller, who both led Goldman’s influential securities division, as well as Edward C. Forst, a head of asset management and member of Goldman’s management committee.

A new regulatory filing analyzed by The New York Times and Footnoted.com, a division of Morningstar that analyzes corporate filings, shows that Goldman started the year with 483 partners. Fifty left and another 10 others were added to the partnership pool. The size of the pool, as of the end of December, is 442 people.

There are just 33 partners at the firm who were partners when Goldman went public in 1999, down six from this time last year.

On Wall Street, becoming a partner has long been considered the pinnacle of success. Partners are typically the best-paid employees at the firm, and have a larger say in how the bank is run. Only a small fraction of Goldman employees will make it to this level, and it can take years to make partner.

But over the last year Goldman has seen profits dip and has been forced to cut staff and slash costs. As Goldman shrinks, so does the partnership pool. Goldman tries to keep the percentage of partners to employees at 1.8 percent, according to people with knowledge of the process. So as Goldman shrinks, it can be expected that the number of partners will also fall. It is not possible to track partner defections for every year since the firm went public, but the data available suggests that the annual partner loss is 2011 is one of the worst since it went public.

Some Goldman partners have been eager to leave, according to people who have spoken to them but are not authorized to speak on the record. The firm has been going through a transition period since the financial crisis. Its earnings prowess has been eroded by continued economic worries here and abroad as well as new regulations that have eaten into profits.

Since the crisis, Goldman has also become a symbol of excess and has taken a beating from lawmakers and protestors alike. This has dragged down morale in the firm, weighing on the minds of partners considering leaving.

The corporate filings reviewed by The Times and Footnoted also show that 56 percent of the current partnership is based in the United States and another 13 percent is in Britain. More than half of the new partners are from Australia and New Zealand, the result of Goldman buying the rest of an existing business there.