Insiders

Goldman's Blankfein is only major financial firm CEO to join Trump on China trip

November 02, 2017 at 12:26 pm EDT

(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc (>> Goldman Sachs Group) Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein will visit China as part of a business delegation in November at the same time as U.S. President Donald Trump, a Goldman spokesman confirmed.

Blankfein will be the only executive of a major financial company traveling as part of the trade mission which is being led by U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, according to a preliminary list.

Executives from major industrial companies including General Electric Co (>> General Electric Company), Honeywell International Inc (>> Honeywell International) and Boeing Co (>> Boeing Company (The)) are on the list, as well as a large number of leaders from energy and commodities firms.

Blankfein has publicly used Twitter to speak out against Trump. In January, he became the first major Wall Street leader to speak out against Trump's order to halt arrivals from several Muslim-majority countries.

He also criticized the White House's decision in September to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that protects young, undocumented immigrants from deportation.

China is an important region for Goldman, which ranked as the top M&A dealmaker in Asia-Pacific excluding Japan in the first nine months of the year, according to Thomson Reuters data. While Wall Street firms like Goldman have to partner with a Chinese joint venture firm to run their investment banking businesses on the mainland, U.S. banks have for years been trying to operate these businesses on their own.

Following a trip to Beijing earlier this year, Blankfein said there was a "a lot of confidence in China" and it was "almost an island of stability."

(Reporting by Olivia Oran in New York; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

By Olivia Oran

Stocks treated in this article : Boeing Company (The), General Electric Company, Honeywell International, Goldman Sachs Group

Stocks mentioned in the article

	Add to a list Add to a list 0 selected To use this feature you must be a member Log in Sign up	Price	Change	5d. change	Capi.
	GE AEROSPACE	162.7 USD	+8.30%	+3.76%	164B
	THE GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, INC.	423.9 USD	+1.57%	+6.82%	143B

Lloyd Blankfein

Lloyd Craig Blankfein (born September 20, 1954) is an American business executive. He is the CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He assumed this position upon the May 2006 nomination of former CEO Henry Paulson to United States Secretary of the Treasury.

Biography

Early life
Lloyd Blankfein was born in the Bronx borough of New York City, to a Jewish family, and reared in the Linden Houses, a New York City Housing Authority project in the East New York section of Brooklyn. His father was a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service branch in the Manhattan borough of New York City and his mother was a receptionist. As a boy, he worked as a concession vendor at Yankee Stadium. and then Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. In 1981, he joined Goldman's commodities trading arm, J. Aron & Co., as a precious metals salesman in its London office.

He has served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs since 2006. He earned a total of $54.4 million in 2006 as one of the highest paid executives on Wall Street. His bonus reflected the performance of Goldman Sachs, which reported record net earnings of $9.5 billion. The compensation included a cash bonus of $27.3 million, with the rest paid in stock and options. While CEO of Goldman Sachs Group in 2007, Blankfein earned a total compensation of $53,965,418, which included a base salary of $600,000, a cash bonus of $26,985,474, stocks granted of $15,542,756 and options granted of $10,453,031.

In 2009, the Financial Times named Blankfein its "2009 Person of the Year", stating, "His bank has stuck to its strengths, unashamedly taken advantage of the low interest rates and diminished competition resulting from the crisis to make big trading profits." Critics of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street have taken issue with those practices. Taking a different view, Forbes listed Blankfein as one of "The Most Outrageous CEOs of 2009."

Source @ Wikipedia

View full profile