It's
now time for us, as a nation, to come together and congratulate the
winner of the 2016 presidential election: Goldman Sachs.
by
Jon Schwarz
Many
Donald Trump voters likely believed his victory would be a loss for
Goldman. At the Republican convention, a man who seemed to take
Trump’s twitter attacks on Goldman seriously screamed “Goldman
Sachs!” at Ted Cruz’s banker wife as she fled the convention
floor. Trump’s own final campaign video declared that he would do
battle against the “global power structure that is responsible
for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class,
stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the
pockets of a handful of large corporations” — as personified
on screen by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
But
that was then. As Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund manager and top
adviser to Trump, as well as a former Goldman Sachs banker himself,
put it Thursday: “I think the cabal against the bankers is
over.”
The
headlines on Friday were that the director of Trump’s National
Economic Council will be Gary Cohn, the president and chief operating
officer of Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, Trump’s pick for treasury
secretary is Steven Mnuchin, a one-time Goldman Sachs partner whose
father was also a Goldman partner. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief
strategist, also once worked for Goldman.
Of
course, a Hillary Clinton win would have been a victory for Goldman
Sachs too. She was paid $675,000 by Goldman for three speeches, had
previously received large campaign donations from Blankfein, and her
son-in-law runs a hedge fund whose investors include Blankfein.
Goldman
also won the election in 2008 and 2012. Barack Obama received more
money from Goldman Sachs employees than any other corporation. Tim
Geithner, Obama’s first treasury secretary, was the protege of
one-time Goldman co-chairman Robert Rubin. Obama’s Justice
Department never went after Goldman criminally, despite the copious
evidence from a Senate investigation that it had broken the law.
Before
that, Goldman won the election in 2000 and 2004. George W. Bush
plucked Hank Paulson directly from Goldman — where Paulson was
chairman and CEO — to be his treasury secretary. Paulson then
oversaw the huge Wall Street bailout that kept Goldman from
collapsing (so it could later make Blankfein a billionaire) with help
from former Goldman banker Neel Kashkari. And they were just two of
the voluminous number of Goldmanites staffing the Bush
administration.
Goldman’s
1992 and 1996 victories manifested themselves when the president
before Bush, Bill Clinton, made Rubin his treasury secretary. Rubin
played a central role in the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a
Depression-era banking law that separated commercial and investment
banking. During the 2008 Goldman took advantage of the absence of
Glass-Steagall to turn itself into a bank holding company, giving it
additional access to lending from the Federal Reserve.
Goldman
Sachs stock has gone up 33 percent in value since the 2016 election,
and Blankfein himself is purring like a kitten. Trump, he says, is
not “dangerous” and “I am not pessimistic at all because he
won. … Mr. Trump may turn out to be a much better president than
anyone else might have been in that place.”
What
about the direct personal attacks on him? “That was the rhetoric
in the heat of the political battle; I didn’t take this
personally.” This is quite a contrast with Blankfein’s
perspective on Bernie Sanders’s denunciation of him this spring,
which he said was “dangerous.”
So
have all the elections you want. Democrats and Republicans can lose;
it happens all the time. But Goldman Sachs always wins.
Source:
Related:
Comments
Post a Comment