Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO David Solomon said he hasn’t landed on a firm view about whether US public companies, including his own, should shift to reporting earnings half as often as the current standard.
“I’m not ready to give … public advocacy on one side or the other,” Solomon said during a wide-ranging discussion at a Thursday event hosted by Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy. “It’s not a crystal-clear issue and, you know, until a week ago, I didn’t know it was something I needed to think about right now,” he added.
Few major bank CEOs have weighed in on the topic since President Trump floated the idea earlier this month in a Truth Social post that companies should be required to report finanicial results only every six months — moving away from the quarterly reporting that defines much of corporate America’s calendar.
Current regulations require publicly traded companies to report earnings on a quarterly basis, though providing forecasts is voluntary. The rules can be changed by a majority vote at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, where Republicans hold a voting majority.
Last Friday, in a CNBC interview, Trump’s appointed SEC chair, Paul Atkins, said that after discussing the topic with the president, he believed that “the market can decide what proper cadence is.”
In the Thursday talk, Solomon said that the argument for making the change “is you can get adequate financial disclosure in [longer] reporting cycles, and it frees up both time and economic opportunity to really focus on the business and take a longer-term view around how you want to invest in the business.”
On the other hand, he said the argument against such a move is that it decreases transparency for investors. “There’s always a good argument for more transparency,” Solomon said.
One major bank CEO has already been clear about their feelings on quarterly earnings. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon has previously lambasted the practice. He warned as far back as 2018 in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, co-authored with Warren Buffett, that the short-term focus of meeting quarterly earnings expectations “is harming the economy.”
“To the the extent there’s changes made that move other companies toward a longer term orientation, that’s probably net net good for the economy,” Charles Schwab CEO (SCHW) Rick Wurster told Yahoo Finance earlier Thursday.
“That all said, I think that there’s still going to be a demand from shareholders, analysts, for regular communication,” Wurster added.
