Unlike the the other banks, whose financial results have become absolutely meaningless when attempting to divind their financial conditions (although as we showed, the broad trends for the first three, JPM, Wells and BofA have been substantially lower), Goldman Sachs is a breath of fresh air because the hedge fund without deposits is unable to resort to the traditional balance sheet gimmicks used be the other TBTF banks, and the only thing that matters is its P&L.
Which is also the problem, because for those curious why the stock is currently sliding and hitting 3 month lows, the reason is that said P&L in the one most important category, FICC revenue, was nothing short of the Jefferies-hinted disaster, and at $1.218 billion, it was not only a huge miss to expectations of $1.6 billion, but was 30% lower compared to a year ago, and is the lowest FICC revenue since Lehman.
And while the FDIC-backed hedge fund may have beaten on the EPS and top line, the reason why investors are less than excited, is because as the chart below shows, the trend is most certainly not the friend of either Lloyd Blankfein or Goldman's shareholders.
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The result in Goldman's own words, only $2 billion set aside in compensation accrual in Q4 - the lowest amount since the abysmal, for the company, Q4 2011.
It also means that the average compensation for any of Goldman's 34,000 workers just dropped to "only" $373,265 on a trailing 12 month basis, the lowest since Q2 2012!
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