Goldman Sachs M&A Chief Signals No Layoffs Are Coming Soon

Stephan Feldgoise, Goldman Sachs's head of global M&A, told Bloomberg TV this week that Wall Street is sitting on enough capital to sustain a long deal cycle, and his team's headcount is not at risk while he waits for that money to move. The signal matters on a firm-wide backdrop that is anything but calm: Goldman is shifting away from its traditional practice of conducting headcount reductions in both spring and fall, moving instead toward smaller, rolling layoffs spread over several months.

Feldgoise is firmly in the optimist camp. In the Bloomberg interview, he pointed to 2025's slow start, including the "Liberation Day" tariff shock, which ultimately "turned into one of the most active if not the most active" second halves of the year on record. His conclusion: a rough patch at the front of the year does not tell you much about where deals end up.

The numbers he cited are hard to dismiss. Leveraged buyouts are at all-time highs, the market for transactions worth $5 billion or more is as strong as it has ever been, and Feldgoise said he is seeing nearly double the deal volume in the $5 billion to $10 billion range, a trend he compared to M&A cycles of the early 2000s and 2010s. The U.S. M&A market saw the biggest surge of mega-deals in a decade in 2025: 11 transactions announced with values above $30 billion, compared to seven in 2024, with aggregate deal value surpassing $2 trillion for the first time since 2021.

The core of Feldgoise's argument is simple: capital at this scale does not stay on the sidelines. "There is an incredible amount of capital sitting with investors," he said. "Public equity, private equity, public debt, private debt. That quantum of capital is substantial, looking to invest in transactions into companies. There's lots of ways that capital can reach its destination."

Bulge-bracket top management, in the words of one analysis, "genuinely believe that the pools of cash on the sidelines are about to be put to work," and think it's a real enough possibility "that you don't want to be caught napping when the next wave of deals begins." That is good news given that Goldman is embarking on a new exercise in rolling job cuts, because Feldgoise "seems willing to see through the empty months without removing heads."

This year, Goldman is skipping its usual spring Strategic Resource Assessment in favor of a series of smaller cuts, with the first round expected in April and more layoffs continuing through summer. The move gives divisional leaders more control over timing, allowing quicker decisions on underperformers rather than waiting for the next firm-wide review cycle. A Goldman spokesperson said "regular, consistent head count management is nothing out of the ordinary for a public company."

The headwinds are real. America and Israel's war with Iran risks delaying M&A deals and IPOs, increasing inflation, postponing interest rate cuts, and creating the kind of unforeseen volatility that contributes to trading losses. Global investment banking revenue is tracking about 10% above last year and M&A is up 25%, but credit losses have begun to appear and geopolitical drama has not faded.

For analysts and associates on Goldman's M&A desk, Feldgoise's public posture is the clearest signal yet that deal teams are not being sized down to weather the slow stretch. For those grinding through due diligence on mandates that may or may not close amid current volatility, the message from the top of Goldman's dealmaking franchise is that the cycle is not broken. The capital is there. The question is which transactions it flows into first.