If you are visiting Lower Manhattan, you could stay at the Ritz Carlton Battery Park, where you will have fabulous views of the Statue of Liberty, 400 thread-count linens, and a telescope in your room.  Or you could stay at the nearby Embassy Suites, where your view will be of Jersey City, your cotton-poly blend sheets will have a thread-count of 250, you will get free Budweiser at happy hour, and your nightly cost will about half the rate of the Ritz.  If you are an employee of Goldman Sachs, you'll now be staying at the Embassy Suites, according to an article in today's Wall Street Journal.  Goldman Sachs also owns the Embassy Suites hotel, so it has some extra incentive to put up its employees there.  But the cheaper hotel rooms are just part of an overall cutback in spending:

Goldman people working late can only put in for $20 in dinner costs; the old limit was $25. If Goldman employees want to take a hired car home, they have to wait until 10 p.m., an hour later than before. The firm recently slashed the number of computer printers at its New York headquarters, frustrating employees who now have farther to walk in order to retrieve pitchbooks.

"These firms don't want to do anything that harms their ability to produce revenue, but in this environment they have to be incredibly mindful of protecting shareholder value," said Glenn Schorr, an analyst at UBS AG. "If that means buying a hotel like the Embassy Suites and having employees stay there, so be it."

Goldman, which accepted $10 billion in federal bank-rescue funds last year, has also taken great pains to not appear profligate, with all the intense government scrutiny over banks' spending on luxuries. It called off its big Miami hedge-fund conference scheduled for the first week in March and moved a three-day technology conference in late February from the Mandalay Bay casino-resort in Las Vegas to the San Francisco Marriott.

You can read the full article here.