Goldman Sachs revenue drops 40%

Goldman Sachs - 1Q16 net profit of $1.2bn, down 56% YoY, due to a difficult trading environment, with the weakest result coming from the investing and lending unit, where the bank posted net revenues of $87m, down 95% YoY. This comes as the bank takes a number of steps to cut costs and improve profitability, including cutting salaries in bonuses.

Goldman Sachs has been betting that it will again see around the next corner better than its competitors.

As other large banks have been cutting back the trading and investing businesses that have long defined Wall Street, Goldman has fearlessly stuck to its guns.

But after Goldman on Tuesday delivered the worst first-quarter results of any major bank — the latest of many challenging quarters — the firm faced some tough questions about whether a raft of changes in regulations and financial markets might be making its focus on Wall Street businesses the wrong bet.

“When does Goldman say the time has come for transformational change — that we must do something radically different because we’re getting nowhere?” the banking analyst Richard X. Bove, asked Goldman executives on a conference call after the company announced its financial results for the first three months of the year.