A goldman opportunity?Goldman Sachs is a very big, very profitable, very important bank, the leaders of which have sway not only within their own company, but also within the industry and probably within the nation as well. Even people who don’t know exactly what Goldman Sachs does know the name and probably see it as Wall Street personified.
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Which is one likely reason why Color of Change, a racial-justice nonprofit that got its start after the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, is going after Goldman, as our Allissa Kline reported, calling the bank out for what it sees as backtracking on promises Goldman made in recent years related to DEI efforts. Color of Change is paying for ads in Times Square calling attention to all this, which started running in April. Even the tourists flying in from Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Madrid and a hundred other cities probably know the name Goldman Sachs. In that sense, it is a well-chosen target.
Goldman said that it is just as committed to diversity as ever “but we have to operate within the guidelines of the law in recruiting our talent and developing our programs.” The problem there is that the law has changed and has become more hostile to efforts deemed “DEI.”
Color of Change can probably afford the ad campaign (it took in about $15 million in contributions in 2025), but I’m not sure it will have much effect. It would be nice to assume companies can be swayed by moral arguments; Goldman CEO David Solomon after all was one of the 181 CEOs who signed the Business Roundtable’s 2019 “purpose of a corporation” manifesto, which specifically touted fostering diversity as a central goal for companies.
But the bottom line of a for-profit company is the bottom line on the P&L statement. Which means financial incentives are probably going to outweigh moral incentives. I’m not even saying that is good or bad, just reality. And right now the law, as Goldman pointed out, is pushing the incentives away from diversity as an active endeavor.
Jamie Dimon is running for president
Okay, of course he isn’t. But at certain stretches of the JPMorganChase CEO’s 2026 shareholder letter, it sure seemed that way. Our Nathan Place highlighted five key points Dimon made in this year’s missive. One of them was a company campaign called the American Dream Initiative and you could be forgiven if you expected to be asked to make a campaign donation after reading about it.
“I continue to believe the American Dream is alive, but it’s slipping out of reach for too many people — and it’s now affecting generations of families,” Dimon wrote. “This slows economic growth, hurts communities and prevents many people from getting ahead. Further, it deeply damages Americans’ faith and confidence in their country.”
If that doesn’t sound like a line from a stump speech, I’m not sure what does. Dimon’s ambitions are more likely to replace Warren Buffett as Wall Street’s avuncular eminence grise rather than winning any elections, but if he ever decides to run for anything, he’s got his talking points already set.
