Tag Archives: goldman-sachs

The Dead Pool – 19 May 2017

by JanieFairthorne Posted on May 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Today we learned that Jim Donovan, a 25-year Goldman Sachs banking and investment management executive, is pulling out as Trump’s nominee to serve as Deputy Treasury Secretary. Why? “Family concerns.” That may be true, but it’s also likely that he’s rich and doesn’t want to divest everything he owns just to be a deputy in a dysfunctional administration where he could get fired at any moment if the president gets annoyed with him.

In other news, I’ve removed Sebastian Gorka from the dead pool since he still seems to be around. I’ll put him back if and when he takes a position elsewhere in the administration that’s allegedly more important than being on the president’s staff.

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The Dead Pool – 19 May 2017

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Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

by AnnabelCorrigan Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump the tycoon railed against big banks, claimed he cared passionately about the little guy, and vowed to make the economy work for struggling middle-class Americans. But after winning, he placed the American economy in the hands of Gary Cohn, the chief operating officer and president of Goldman Sachs. In January, Trump named Cohn chairman of the National Economic Council, the president’s top financial and economic whizzes. Cohn would be the highest authority on the economy within the White House. He quit his Goldman Sachs gig, but he left with an estimated $285 million severance package and agreed to sell a $16 million-stake in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Cohn certainly lives in a different economic reality than most Americans, and thanks to financial disclosure forms released on Friday night by the White House—which cover 180 of its officials and staffers and detail their finances when they arrived at the White House—the public can see just how different.

In 2015 and 2016, according to the form for Cohn, he earned between $39 million and $45 million from Goldman Sachs. This includes salary ($1.8 million last year), annual $5.4 million cash bonuses, and tens of millions of dollars in stock options, dividends, and interest. This doesn’t count what he brought in via various Goldman Sachs-operated retirement accounts. Nor does it take into account the money he pocketed from his sprawling brokerage accounts, which included Goldman Sachs investment funds. Cohn also had millions invested in hedge funds, real estate properties around the country, and numerous companies, including that Chinese bank, a high-end cosmetic retailer, and multiple medical technology firms. All told, it appears Cohn earned as much as $75 million last year.

Cohn is not the only Goldman alum to join the Trump administration. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary, worked at Goldman for years, and last month Trump hired another former Goldman Sachs top executive to be Mnuchin’s No. 2 at Treasury. The bank has been wildly successful over the last two decades, but it also has become a symbol of Wall Street’s excesses. It played a key role in the 2008 financial crash that led to a nationwide economic meltdown. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton was slammed repeatedly—by both her Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders and Trump—for giving paid speeches to Goldman executives. And before he wrapped up the GOP nomination, Trump attacked Republican rival Ted Cruz, pointing out that Cruz’s wife worked at Goldman Sachs and that he had received a loan from the firm.

Cohn’s full financial disclosure can be found below.

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Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (PDF)

Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (Text)

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Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

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Bernie Sanders Attacks Hillary Clinton’s Ties to Big Banks

by EarthaTWHH Posted on January 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton’s ties to big banks, taking off the gloves on Sunday night in the last Democratic presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses.

Asked to lay out the difference between his and Clinton’s plans for dealing with big banks, Sanders responded with a personal jab.

“The first difference is, I don’t take money from big banks, I don’t get personal speaking fees from Goldman Sachs,” Sanders said, to boos and scattered applause from the audience.

Goldman Sachs paid Clinton $675,000 in speaking fees in 2015, according to public disclosures. Wall Street reform is a key plank in Sanders’ campaign platform.

“Can you really reform Wall Street when they are spending millions and millions of dollars on campaign contributions and when they are providing speaker fees to individuals?” Sanders asked. “So it’s easy to say, well, I’m going to do this and do that, but I have doubts when people receive huge amounts of money from Wall Street.”

Clinton responded by suggesting that Sanders had cast aspersions not only on her ties to financial corporations, but on President Barack Obama as well. “He’s criticized President Obama for taking donations from Wall Street, and President Obama has led our country out of the great recession…I’m going to defend President Obama for taking on Wall Street, taking on the financial industry and getting results,” Clinton said.

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Bernie Sanders Attacks Hillary Clinton’s Ties to Big Banks

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Jeb Bush Is Beating Hillary Clinton in the Goldman Sachs Primary

by LeilaniSandberg Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past three months, Goldman Sachs employees have donated more than $147,000 to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, helping him to an early lead in what might be called the Goldman Sachs primary. But winning the biggest share of contributions from the controversial, economic-crash-enhancing investment firm isn’t going to be a cakewalk for Bush. At least three other major presidential candidates—including Hillary Clinton, who has longstanding ties to the Wall Street giant—have bagged money from Goldman, with two of them using Goldman Sachs lobbyists to raise money for their campaigns.

Bush’s biggest rival in the Goldman money chase is his fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio’s campaign snagged just over $60,000 from Goldman Sachs. And Rubio has a Goldman insider hitting up his own network of wealthy friends for contributions. One of the three registered lobbyists bundling donations for Rubio is Joe Wall, a vice-president for government affairs at Goldman Sachs. Wall has so far reported bundling more than $90,000 for Rubio.

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Jeb Bush Is Beating Hillary Clinton in the Goldman Sachs Primary

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Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

by MaricruMusselma Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Pointing to recently leaked audio recordings between officials at the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs bankers, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is slamming regulators for being far too timid and compliant when it comes to laying down the law with big banks.

“Well, ultimately this report tells us exactly what we already knew — that the relationship between regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is too cozy to provide the kind of tough oversight that’s really needed,” Warren said in an interview with NPR.

“We can keep making the rules tougher and tougher, but it won’t make an ounce of difference if the regulators won’t enforce the rules that are there,” she added. “If the regulators back down or back off whenever the banks tell them to, then it’s the banks—and not the regulators—who are running the show.”

While the secret recordings, which were captured by former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Carmen Segarra, do not expose any flagrant wrongdoing by either side, they do reveal an uncomfortable, wholly inappropriate eagerness to please Goldman Sachs. And let’s keep in mind Segarra’s secret tapes were recorded in 2012, at least four solid years after the financial crisis.

After This American Life and ProPublica jointly released the tapes last week, Warren and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) have also called for a federal investigation into the dealings of the New York Federal Reserve.

The New York Fed has since “categorically rejected” the accusations, but Warren tells NPR the public needs more individuals like Segerra who are willing to speak up against institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

“We need to look at whether or not we’ve got the right tools to protect the kind of people who will speak up. But, but what we’ve got to start with is we’ve got to expose what happened here, we’ve got to look at what the available tools are, but we’ve got to give the message loud and clear to the Fed: Um, this isn’t gonna work — you work for the American people, you don’t work for the big banks.”

Originally posted here – 

Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

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Is Obamacare Boosting the Economy? Color Me Skeptical.

by CharlieE87 Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

This is interesting:

Alec Phillips, economic researcher at Goldman Sachs, said in a note issued late last week to clients that subsidies from the Affordable Care Act boosted gross domestic product during the first quarter and are likely to do the same during the second quarter.

….Spending in the health-care industry was up 9.9% in the first quarter….But the health-care industry won’t be the only one to benefit, Phillips says, as subsidies will free up income for those who had no coverage before, as well as those who had insurance but were paying for it themselves.

“Overall, around 40% of the subsidies should find their way to non-health consumption this year,” he wrote.

I don’t have access to the full Goldman Sachs report, but I’m dubious about this for two reasons. First, Obamacare is roughly revenue neutral, which means federal subsidies are all paid for via tax revenue. Obamacare really shouldn’t have any first-order net stimulative effect on personal income or GDP. Second, although subsidies will reduce health insurance bills for people who were previously covered—thus freeing up income for other purposes—the individual mandate will force previously uncovered people to buy insurance they didn’t have before. This will reduce the income they have for other purposes. I don’t know how this nets out, but I’d be surprised if it was favorable to sectors other than health care.

Maybe Phillips has carefully run the numbers on all these things, and the effects are bigger than I think. There may be second-order distributional impacts, for example. For now, though, I’d be pretty cautious about assuming that Obamacare is having any substantial effect on the economy one way or the other.

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Is Obamacare Boosting the Economy? Color Me Skeptical.

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