Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs & JPMorgan are barely hiring & Goldman is cutting, again. Citadel's top man to work for

If you thought banks would open the hiring floodgates in the final quarter of 2025 in anticipation of a fine 2026, then yesterday's results from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citi are a revelation. It's not happening.

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Instead of hiring, Goldman Sachs - which cut vice president (VP) jobs earlier this year and which was said to have cancelled its plans any for further job cuts back in July - is cutting again. 

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Goldman is planning an additional "limited" round of job cuts later this year despite posting record third quarter revenues yesterday. Business Insider has the full memo sent by David Solomon and John Waldron, which says the cuts are all about moving to a new AI-powered "operating system" to be known henceforth as "OneGS 3.0." Goldman is looking at "touchpoints" and "back to front workstreams" where jobs could be automated by AI, including sales enablement, client onboarding and lending. But the WSJ has spoken to Goldman people who say low performers will be eliminated too.

Goldman isn't just sifting out unnecessary staff, though. It's also avoiding hiring new ones. In yesterday's memo, Solomon and Waldron also said the firm plans to "constrain headcount growth" until the end of this year. That matches with what we've heard from insiders. Even a few months ago, one senior technologist there told us there were "huge barriers" to hiring anyone and that open roles in his team were being closed.

If you can't join Goldman Sachs, you unfortunately probably can't join JPMorgan either. As we noted yesterday, headcount in the bank has barely shifted in the past year, despite soaring revenues and profits and despite a program of very senior banker hiring. 

Speaking yesterday, JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum, explained why. While acknowledging that “Conditions have been kind of as good as you can hope for,” Barnum said JPMorgan is engaging in "old-fashioned expense discipline" and that this means it's 'constraining headcount growth.' JPMorgan has a "very strong bias against having the reflective response to any given need to hire more people," said Barnum. If you ask for a new team member there, you won't get one. 

As at Goldman Sachs, AI is partly to blame. However, Barnum isn't as gung ho as Solomon and Waldron. When people are forced to engage with AI, Barnum said you can end up with a situation where they're "scrambling around" to find uses and the bank is distracted from necessary "underlying process reengineering." Nonetheless, AI is there and any hire must be scrutinised against the possibility that an LLM could do the job instead. 

If you can't get a job at Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan, you could still try Citi. The bank is still spending a fortune ($3.5bn this year) on transforming its processes and still hasn't got its regulatory reporting right, so it presumably still needs heads there. But as we noted yesterday, it too is ringing the bell on hiring expensive new talent: Citi says its build is "largely complete."

Separately, there's always hedge fund Citadel which appears to be going from strength to strength and which FT Alphaville observes has just made the unusual move of acquiring Hamburg power trading company FlexPower. 

That move appears to have been engineered by Sebastian Barrack, who runs Citadel's enormous commodities trading business and who is the sort of person whose eye it is good to catch. Speaking two years ago, Barrack said he hires three kinds of people: people from non-traditional backgrounds like academia, who know about things like meteorology and power transmission; committed commodities investors; and the most talented people at universities.

Unfortunately, getting a job at Citadel is even harder than getting into a US bank.

Meanwhile...

Goldman's job cuts will hit in the coming weeks and cost savings will be redirected into compensation. (WSJ)

Jamie Dimon says the future is uncertain. There are “signs of a softening, particularly in job growth,” he said. “There continues to be a heightened degree of uncertainty stemming from complex geopolitical conditions, tariffs and trade uncertainty, elevated asset prices and the risk of sticky inflation.” (Bloomberg) 

Jamie Dimon says the collapse of First Brands and Tricolor are a bad omen. “My antenna goes up when things like that happen. I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more. Everyone should be forewarned on this one.” (Bloomberg) 

Goldman Sachs, Citi and JPMorgan all warned that we're in bubble territory. (Financial Times) 

Goldman reported a smaller credit-loss provision from a year earlier at $339m — less than expectations, while JPMorgan’s $3.4bn exceeded analyst estimates. JPMorgan lost money on Tricolor Holdings; Goldman didn't. (Bloomberg) 

JPMorgan's $3.4bn credit losses were its worse for a quarter since the pandemic broke out in 2020. (WSJ)

Goldman Sachs earned its highest third quarter revenues ever in Q3 2025. (Bloomberg) 

Goldman is now on pace for its best year ever in its main investment-banking and markets division. (WSJ) 

Even after cutting heads, Goldman expects to end this year with more people than it began. The firm’s headcount was 48,300 at the end of September, about 1,800 more employees than at the end of 2024. (Bloomberg) 

A Swiss court said regulators decision to wipe out Credit Suisse bonds during the UBS rescue was unlawful but it hasn't said whether investors should be repaid. (FT) 

Citi says its conductyd 1 million AI driving code reviews this year, creating an extra 100,000 hours of weekly capacity. It's also got an Agentic AI for 5,000 people which allows complex, multi-step tasks to be completed with a single prompt. (GuruFocus)

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