Nowhere was the news met with more surprise than inside Goldman Sachs. Members of the management committee were stunned, according to people familiar with the matter. Blankfein, who steered the firm through the financial crisis, has yet to set a timetable for his departure or discuss his plans with senior colleagues, one of the people said.
It's hardly a secret that Blankfein might move on in the near future. Solomon and Schwartz have been jockeying to succeed Blankfein for months.
Blankfein, the son of a postal worker who grew up in a Brooklyn housing project, has become a billionaire from his Goldman Sachs career. He rose through the firm's trading business and took the top job in 2006, when Hank Paulson left to become Treasury secretary. Much of his work in recent years has been repairing the bank's image after Congressional hearings and media scrutiny focusing on the firm's role in the mortgage bond bubble that helped bring about the financial crisis.
Mike Mayo, a bank analyst at Wells Fargo & Co., said the bank has four good contenders as CEO a year from now. In addition to Solomon and Schwartz, Mayo said in a Bloomberg Television interview he'd consider former Goldman president and Trump administration adviser Gary Cohn a candidate, as well as Blankfein, "because it's not certain he will be gone and we've had these reports in the past."
CEO Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. (Photo: AP) 
