17,000 missing staff at Goldman Sachs. Lavish lifestyle of the Deutsche Bank VP

There is a vacuum at Goldman Sachs. Where there were supposed to be tens of thousands of industrious graduates of the world’s finest educational institutions, there is merely a queue for the restrooms and some MDs looking out the windows. So says the New York Times, which has learned of a large empty space at Goldman’s new building in Manhattan.

When it was built in 2005, the Manhattan building was conceived to house 50,000 people, says the NYT. Instead, it houses 33,000.  In 2005, Goldman had envisaged hiring 19,000 people in New York City. Actually, it’s hired just 2,000 there in the past decade. All the recent recruits are sitting in Salt Lake City and Mumbai instead.

The result is that Goldman’s Manhattan office has a surfeit of space. The sixth floor is mostly empty since everyone was commanded to sit together on floor below. All that remains on floor six are MDs who’ve got window offices and people using the toilets. Goldman’s new London office is due for completion in 2018. Is the Manhattan experience a sign of things to come?

Separately, vice presidents (VPs) at Deutsche Bank are dressed in designer items and living in expensive apartments. The Evening Standard reports upon the case of Ege Ackasoy, a VP in Deutsche Bank’s capital markets and treasury solutions team who had a disagreement with his girlfriend. She stands accused of ‘taking a pair of scissors’ to Ackasoy’s $38k wardrobe and smashing a window at his $1.1m apartment. Ackasoy has worked for Deutsche Bank for nine years after starting his career as a buy-side analyst in Turkey. Unless he's reimbursed, he will need to spend some of his coming bonus on new suits.

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