According to a speaker from the transition team of the next US President, Donald Trump, he is going to meet with Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs COO.
This Wall Street Bank was a blank of critics through almost all of Donald Trump´s Presidential campaign. However, there will be a reunion between the elected President, the former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney and Gary Cohn. Romney is currently in the race to be named Secretary of State, and this will be his second meeting with Trump.
After Trump won the election, he has considered several former and current executives from Wall Street to take part of their cabinet. This looks odd because one of the main messages of the campaign was to discredit the role of big banks and powerful financial institutions.
Trump specifically accused the Democrat Candidate Hillary Clinton of having ties with Goldman Sachs.
“(Clinton) meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors,” Trump said in October about Clinton´s relation with Sachs and other financial groups.
The Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said, regarding those declarations, that if any international complot was happening, he didn’t know anything about it.
How to work with Wall Street?
Right now, bank executives are in Washington while doing the best they can to win the friendship of the next Republican President. A significant number of Wall Street lobbyists are raising money to support the transition and even the Independent Community Bankers of America started to reserve dates for events at the Trump International Hotel.
Trump also has show signs of how the next four years will be. He already named Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary. Mnuchin is a former worker for Goldman Sachs, where he developed the mortgage-trading business for over 17 years. He is the third Goldman Sachs executive to acquire that position in the last 25 years, after Robert Rubin under Clinton´s second term and Henry Paulson Jr. in George W. Bush second term.
Another two members of Trump team belonged to Goldman Sachs at one point. Chief strategist Stephen Bannon and transition team member Anthony Scaramucci were part of the Wall Street Bank before working for the Trump Campaign.
What will Cohn do?
The question regards the possible position of Gary Cohn. Cohn is the second most important executive in the firm, just behind CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Cohn is a declared Democrat and in fact has donated considerable amounts of money to Democrat candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, that add up to $275,000. But he also has given money for Republican candidacies like Marco Rubio´s race for the Republican Presidential Nomination.
Source: Wall Street Journal