Goldman Sachs junior bankers complain of workload crash amid SPAC-fueled boom in Wall Street bids

Junior investment bankers at Goldman Sachs are suffering from exhaustion from 100-hour workweeks and are calling for bosses during a SPAC-fueled boom, according to an internal survey conducted by a group of first-year analysts.

The increase in activity has severely affected the mental and physical health of analysts since at least the beginning of the year, according to slides launched on social networks and authenticated by people with knowledge about this issue.

“Sleep deprivation, treatment by senior bankers, mental and physical stress … I went through foster care and this is probably worse,” said a Goldman analyst, according to a February survey of 13 employees.

“My body hurts physically all the time and mentally I am in a very dark place,” said another analyst.

The slide show, full of color-coded diagrams and formatted in the official style of an investment banking pitch, was created after a group of dissatisfied analysts from several teams came together to investigate their colleagues, according to people . First-year analysts are usually recent college graduates and occupy the lowest tier in the Wall Street hierarchy; above them are associates, followed by vice presidents and administrators.

The model on Wall Street is to hire thousands of core workers each year, often top graduates from higher education universities, to create a pipeline for talent and a workforce dedicated to the more mundane aspects of investment banking. . Junior bankers are trading a grueling workload with a higher-than-average U.S. salary and a blow to eventually earning millions of dollars in compensation packages as CEO.

Wall Street working conditions became a hot topic in 2013, after a Bank of America intern in London died after a sleepless night. The industry then began to adopt sheltered weekends, where junior employees could not work on Saturdays or Sundays without the manager’s approval.

However, despite the changes, the culture of the industry remains difficult to load. Goldman respondents called the conditions “inhumane”, saying that working 110 hours a week often leaves only four hours a day for sleep and personal care.

While the survey comes from a small sample of Goldman employees, the bank has taken its concerns seriously, people said. Goldman executives met with employees last month and told them it stimulates the hiring of junior bankers to solve the workload, they said. The bank also transferred employees to strengthen busier teams and worked to automate job issues.

The 13 employees were not punished for creating the survey, whose segment was posted this week on Litquidity’s Instagram account, people said.

“We recognize that our people are very busy because the business is strong and the volumes are at historic levels,” said Nicole Sharp, a Goldman spokeswoman. “A year after COVID, people are understood quite thinly and that’s why we listen to their concerns and take more steps to address them.”

For almost a record year for Wall Street, the IPO market is on fire, driven by unsatisfactory demand from new companies. This demand is being met by SPACs, or blank check companies used to make companies public, and the $ 164 billion SPAC mergers so far this year have already surpassed the 2020 total, according to Dealogic.

Late transactions reached a record high in the first quarter, Goldman chief financial officer Stephen Scherr told a conference call last week. Goldman is the world’s top merger advisor, eliminating JPMorgan Chase in total trading volume and number of transactions.