Barry Ritholtz, Columnist

Building Out Goldman Sachs’s Private-Equity Business

The firm wanted to expand in Asia. Henry Cornell got the call.

May 19, 2020 at 5:36 PM UTC

Barry Ritholtz is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

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How does one build out the merchant-banking arm of a firm such as Goldman Sachs? If you are Henry Cornell, this week's guest on Masters in Business, you start in Asia. In the late 1980s, Japan was the hottest country in the world and Cornell went there to expand the firm’s local footprint. He hired hundreds of employees and helped establish Goldman’s reputation in the market as a savvy private-equity investor. From there, he moved to Hong Kong in the early 1990s, just as China was beginning to become a more market-based economy.