Allentown Morning Call –When Goldman Sachs Group Inc. went public in May 1999, some on Wall Street figured it was a signal to bail out of brokerage stocks.
If Goldman was letting the public into its business after 130 years as a highly profitable  and secretive  private partnership, the insiders must have known that was as good as it would get.
Hardly. Goldman earned an astounding $9.5 billion last year, a 252 percent increase from its profit of $2.7 billion in 1999.
As for the stock, the $53-a-share price in the initial offering now looks like a giveaway. Goldman stock closed at $216.92 on Friday, up 309 percent from the offering price. The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is up all of 7.5 percent in the same period.
