By Saeed Azhar
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Goldman Sachs has moderated its risk-taking since U.S. President Donald Trump’s April tariff announcement, and the Wall Street bank is braced for more uncertainty, a top executive said.
“We have moderated our risk positioning since April 2nd – I think that’s a sensible thing for us to do,” Goldman President John Waldron said in a podcast released by the investment bank on Thursday.
“We’re absorbing a lot of risk from our clients. We want to continue to do that, but we also, where we can, we (pare) our risk and stay a little bit closer to home.”
Goldman is readying for continued uncertainty in the coming months, which means keeping a greater liquidity cushion, he said.
Financial markets have been turbulent since Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day,” when he announced plans to increase tariffs on trading partners.
Waldron, who is widely seen as the likely successor to Goldman CEO David Solomon, said the tariff move was “very, very disruptive.”
Some companies are now starting to make business decisions based on assumptions that tariffs will be raised to a range of 10% to 15%, he said.
“We’re moving into now an adjustment phase, and you’ll see, I think, some more decision-making on capital spend, M&A transactions, capital return, stock buybacks,” Waldron said.
The U.S. economy is still strong, backed by a solid labor market and consumer spending, he said.
“All those factors in the U.S. to me lead to a likely scenario where we don’t have a recession,” he said.
Meanwhile, Waldron warned investors were getting concerned about an unsustainable U.S. fiscal deficit.
“The bond market is starting to be heard, and I hope that gets some attention in the halls of Congress,” he said.
Rating agency Moody’s cut the pristine U.S. sovereign credit rating by one notch last month, the last of the major ratings agencies to downgrade the country, citing concerns about the nation’s growing $36 trillion debt pile.
The biggest question for markets is the path of interest rates, particularly in the long term, Waldron said.
“We’re seeing a lot of increase in duration in the rate curves in the United States and Japan and many other countries – and I think that could be a brake on economic growth,” he said.
(Reporting by Saeed Azhar, Editing by Lananh Nguyen and Jamie Freed)
