Lloyd Blankfein

In a private company, your company, your partners presumably, you know, everybody cares about making money for their investors and their clients.

But as far as you're concerned, you don't care whether you make money smoothly in 5% higher increments every year.

You can have three, in a 10-year cycle, you can have three fantastic years, make no money for five years and lose money two years.

And it could work out well.

In a private company, you care about the E, the earnings.

In a public company, you care about P-E.

Sure.

And if you have volatile earnings, your shareholders don't like that.

They reward you with a lower multiple or they punish you with a lower multiple.

And we've seen that even more recently with shifting, you know, off balance sheet into funds.

And so you could see over time, you know, Goldman Sachs, and we didn't want to lose the risk-taking culture at Goldman, which is very important.

I'll say why in a second.

Yep.

Beyond the fact that it makes money, it's very important.

But we shifted a lot of that to off-balance sheet vehicles.

And by the way, means you have to do more of it.

Sure.

Because instead of earning $100, you're earning $20 with lower risk.

Yep.

And a higher PE and a higher R return on equity as a result.