President-elect Donald Trump is considering Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn for a senior administration job, possibly as director of the Office of Management and Budget, several sources close to the situation said on Wednesday.
People familiar with the matter say Cohn’s meeting with Trump on Tuesday included talks about a potential job in the new administration, possibly to run OMB, a sprawling office that will handle much of Trump’s budget policy after he takes office in January.
Cohn, who is friendly with both Republicans and Democrats in Washington, is a longtime commodities trader who became Goldman’s president and co-chief operating officer in 2006. He has long been the heir apparent to Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Hillary Clinton deflected a call from a Nevada voter to release transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street groups and pushed back at accusations that her reluctance to make those documents public was just “political rhetoric.”
“I am happy to release anything I have when everyone else does the same, because every other candidate in this race has given speeches to private groups, including Sen. Sanders,” she said during Thursday’s MSNBC Democratic presidential town hall, referring to rival candidate Bernie Sanders.
“I was the candidate who went to Wall Street before the crash. I was the candidate who said to them, ‘You are wrecking our economy.’ ”
Clinton opponents have coalesced around a call for her to release transcripts from paid speeches she gave to major Wall Street firms. They say it will shed light on how tough she would be with the banking sector as president.
But the audience member, an avowed Sanders supporter, questioned her trustworthiness on the issue by referencing her shift on gay marriage.
“I do respect you very much,” the voter said. “In fact, only a decade ago, I was a very big supporter of yourself and your husband.
“It actually broke my heart when you said marriage was between a man and a woman. How can we trust that this isn’t just more political rhetoric? Please just release those transcripts so we know exactly where you stand.”
Clinton pushed back against the characterization and defended of her change of heart on gay marriage by noting endorsements from pro-LGBT groups.
Those are her principles, and if you don’t like them, she has others.
‘LACK OF ENTHUSIASM’ MAY DOOM DOWAGER EMPRESS OF CHAPPAQUA’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: As Michael Walsh spots, even her cheerleaders at the New York Times are forced to grit their teeth and write:
But Mrs. Clinton has a striking problem with young voters. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that a solid plurality of young voters has a negative view of Mrs. Clinton. She did even worse in a Bloomberg Politics national poll. Here is a result to unnerve her Brooklyn campaign headquarters: Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton get a 60 percent favorable rating with 18-to-29-year-olds. She gets 35 percent approval and 57 percent unfavorable.
Though she criticizes the American economy as being “rigged” for the rich*, Mrs. Clinton has lost some support recently from party members who think she would go easy on Wall Street excess if elected.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gets grief from a lot of conservatives for having changed his position over the years on important issues like abortion and government-run health care. But Romney is a rank amateur compared to the doubletalk coming from President Obama on the topic of Wall Street. On the one hand, there is the former community organizer Obama. This Obama has made it clear in recent weeks that he is at one with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying, for example, when ABC asked how he viewed the demonstrators, that “the most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side. …”
But then there is the Obama who is more than happy to accept high-dollar contributions from every Gordon Gecko on Wall Street. As the Washington Post recently reported, Obama has accepted more money — more than $15.6 million — from these people than all of the Republican presidential aspirants combined.
PRESIDENT GOLDMAN SACHS: Obama Has More Cash From Wall Street Than All GOP Hopefuls Combined. “Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.”
“Whenever asked any, even slightly controversial question, Hillary Clinton will constantly vacillate on it. She dodges an answer on almost everything.”
When compared to Clinton, another Democrat said Sanders is “talking straight about what’s needed.”
“My perception is he doesn’t need to test his policy positions or what he stands for before he says something and I find that trustworthy,” she told PJ Media.
A Northern Virginia Democratic voter said Sanders speaks the truth regardless of the subject, contrary to Clinton. He said it is “very hard “ to support Clinton as “the Wall Street candidate.”
But wouldn’t that make for the appropriate level of continuity with President Goldman-Sachs?
During Jeb Hensarling’s first congressional bid, a man at a campaign stop in Athens, Texas, asked the Republican if he was “pro-business.”
“No,” the candidate replied, drawing curious stares from local business leaders who had gathered to hear him speak, a former Hensarling aide recalled. “I’m not pro-business. I’m pro-free enterprise.”
Now, more than a decade later, that distinction has Wall Street on edge. The new chairman of the House financial services committee wants to limit taxpayers’ exposure to banking, insurance and mortgage lending by unwinding government control of institutions and programs the private sector depends on, from mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to flood insurance.
Banks and other large financial institutions are particularly concerned because Mr. Hensarling plans to push legislation that could require them to hold significantly more capital and establish new barriers between their federally insured deposits and other activities, including trading and investment banking.
“A great case can be made that we need greater capital and liquidity standards,” the conservative 55-year-old Texan said in a recent interview. “Certainly, we have to do a better job ring-fencing, fire-walling—whatever metaphor you want to use—between an insured depository institution and a noninsured investment bank.”
America’s emergency oil stockpile has plunged to 40-year lows. The shrinking Strategic Petroleum Reserve is limiting Washington’s ability to shield consumers from the fallout of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive supply cuts, according to Goldman Sachs.
“At this point, US energy policy has fewer bullets left. It has less levers left in its policy toolkit,” Daan Struyven, head of oil research at Goldman Sachs, told CNN in a phone interview.
That’s one reason Goldman Sachs expects oil prices to stay high, averaging $100 a barrel this time next year. Triple-digit oil would boost already-high prices at the pump, worsening inflation and potentially influencing the 2024 race for the White House.
To cushion the blow from the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration has released vast amounts of oil from the SPR, the underground series of storage tanks along the Gulf Coast that contains emergency oil.
Industry veterans say that strategy helped mitigate the hit to consumers as gasoline prices plunged after hitting $5.02 a gallon in June 2022.
But the SPR, which acts as a rainy-day fund that presidents can tap during times of war or natural disaster, is down by about 270 million barrels over the past two years to the lowest level since August 1983.
Related:
🔸BIDEN ADMINISTRATION 5-YEAR OFF SHORE OIL PLAN TO BE RELEASED ON FRIDAY DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY SALES FOR 2024 – SOURCES
🔸U.S. 5 YEAR OIL LEASE PLAN WILL INCLUDE THE LOWEST LEASE SALES IN HISTORY – SOURCES
The day after the World Bank sounded the alarm about the global economy’s prospects for 2023, Edward Yardeni, the strategist who saw resilience in the US economy last year when almost everyone else was predicting recession, remains sanguine about where global financial assets including US stocks are headed. “The outlook for the world economy is actually improving,” the president and founder of Yardeni Research said Wednesday. US equities “made a low on Oct. 12. That was the end of the bear market and we’re back in a bull market.” Since closing at 3,577.03 that day, the S&P 500 has risen almost 10%, so maybe there’s something to that.
BLOOMBERG: Obama Goes From White House to Wall Street in Less Than One Year. “Obama is coming to Wall Street less than a year after leaving the White House, following a path that’s well trod and well paid. While he can’t run for president, he continues to be an influential voice in a party torn between celebrating and vilifying corporate power. His new work with banks might suggest which side of the debate he’ll be on and disappoint anyone expecting him to avoid a trap that snared Clinton.”
As Hillary Clinton resists calls to release transcripts from her paid Goldman Sachs speeches, details of those events are emerging, and they aren’t good for the Democratic presidential candidate.
“It was pretty glowing about us,” one attendee at an Oct. 2013 Goldman Sachs event in Arizona told Politico about Clinton’s speech, which earned the former secretary of state $225,000. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.” . . .
Clinton does have the ability to release the transcripts if she chooses.
Her speaking contracts — which went through the Harry Walker Agency — stipulate that the speeches be transcribed and that she retain rights to them.
She won’t be voluntarily releasing these transcripts. I am waiting for the audience-generated videos to emerge. I bet they’re worth a lot of money.
RELATED: Bill Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey to campaign against Hillary: “Willey is joining the Rape Accountability Project for Education PAC, or RAPE PAC, as its paid national spokeswoman, Reuters reported Monday. She will give public remarks and appear in political advertisements detailing claims of Bill Clinton’s past sexual misconduct.”
This is a candidate who has racked up millions of dollars in speaking fees from financial firms, along with millions more in campaign contributions. That is to say nothing of the money raked in by her husband. (Or the culpability-by-osmosis many progressives assign to her for the regulatory policy decisions made by Bill’s administration.) All those dollars have left her open to skepticism from progressives and to repeated broadsides from Bernie Sanders, among others. “The truth is, you can’t change a corrupt system by taking its money,” Sanders says in one advertisement, even if he refrains from saying Clinton’s name.
Clinton has thus far not always responded elegantly or convincingly to the charge that she’s on Wall Street’s side. During the Democratic debate in Iowa, Sanders lambasted her over her Wall Street cash: “Let’s not be naive about it,” he said. “Over her political career, why has Wall Street been a major, the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton? Now, maybe they’re dumb and they don’t know what they’re going to get, but I don’t think so.”
JERSEY SURE: Mark Steyn explores the weird dissembling throughout yesterday by Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler in response to Trump’s remark that watched on TV “thousands” of Jersey City Muslims celebrating the carnage caused by radical Islam on 9/11:
The past is another country, wrote E M Forster, and the immediate post-9/11 period was a very different land from today’s America. Here, for example, is bigshot mainstream liberal Jonathan Alter writing in Newsweek (then owned by The Washington Post) that there were Muslim schoolchildren in the New York area who had prior knowledge of 9/11.
But the moment passed, and liberals stopped writing such stories, and then denied such stories had ever been written. And year on year more of the specifics of that day were disappeared – starting with the images of the men and women who hurled themselves from the upper floors of the Twin Towers for the chance to spend their final moments falling through clean, bright sky rather than in that hellish inferno. A soft-focus blur, a generalized sadness, a yellow ribbon or two is all that remains. Yet there were Muslims who cheered 9/11 in Oslo and in Yorkshire, and if like Donald Trump you live in New York City, you would have read and heard similar stories from your own neighborhood.
Many Americans remember images like those below, of Palestinians literally dancing in the streets and handing out candy to celebrate the death of thousands of Americans.
These celebrations did not represent all Arabs or Muslims, but they were certainly not isolated (nor were they confined to Arabs and Muslims; some leftists savored the spectacle as well). The footage caused so much public relations damage to the Palestinian cause that Yasser Arafat faked a blood donation in an attempt to save face.
If there had been celebrations like that in the U.S., they would have drawn instant attention and outrage. As John Hinderaker notes at Powerline, the Washington Post reported on Sep. 18, 2011 that “law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.” That seems to provide at least some basis for Trump’s claim that celebrations happened.
As Mark Steyn concludes his article, “There are two competing narratives here:”
If you loathe Trump, the story is: Trump’s suggestion of terrorist sympathizers among American Muslims is outrageous. But, if you’re minded to support Trump, the story is: Obama’s and Hillary’s and Kerry’s assertion that there are no terrorist sympathizers among Muslims is not only ludicrous but mendacious and deeply weird in its relentless insistence. Glenn Kessler’s “fact-check” confirms the latter.
Until the primary elections play themselves out in the coming months, low-information undecided voters are currently stuck between a choice of two highly flawed candidates leading their respective parties, each a product of years spent cocooned in the New York media bubble and its myopic funhouse mirrors. One made his money in New York real estate, the other through massive contributions from the media and Wall Street (including the Obama enablers at Goldman Sachs). Both in their own way are prone to speak in outrageous hyperbole because they have little fear of serious repercussions from their wild utterances. But as Steyn writes, given a choice between two crazed exaggerations — one where “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on September 11th and another where “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” and given our current president’s ongoing escape into fantasyland, who would you count on to keep you safe in the coming years?
Wall Street is acting as though more government intervention will calm financial markets, when it is excessive intervention of government that created the crisis in the first place. Greece is socialism on steroids — a place where the government gives a lot of things away for free, few people work, and millions receive government pensions, paychecks or welfare benefits. Fifty percent of young people don’t have a job and over half of Greeks retire before age 60. The wagon is full and no one is left to pull it. Now Greece thinks that the Germans or the, EU, the IMF or the United States is going to pay for it all. The crash is coming very soon and the standard of living in Greece will surely plummet. Thank you, socialism.
But there are so many more dominoes that could come crashing down. Almost all of Europe is a financial sink hole. The debts as a share of gross domestic product are 100 percent or more and the public spending as a share of GDP is now just shy of 50 percent.
Pundits on the left such as Paul Krugman can only lamely respond to the European meltdown by arguing that there is “too much austerity” even as debt loads keeps rising every year. The one nation in Europe that didn’t use massive Keynesian stimulus, Germany, is the one place where the economy is still functioning.
The official U.S. unemployment rate has indeed fallen steadily during the past few years, but the economic recovery has created the fewest jobs relative to the previous employment peak of any prior recovery. The labor-force participation rate recently touched a 36-year low of 62.7%. The number of Americans not in the labor force set a record high of 92.6 million in September. Part-time work and long-term unemployment are still well above levels from before the financial crisis.
Worse, middle-class incomes continue to fall during the recovery, losing even more ground than during the December 2007 to June 2009 recession. The number in poverty has also continued to soar, to about 50 million Americans. That is the highest level in the more than 50 years that the U.S. Census has been tracking poverty. Income inequality has risen more in the past few years than at any recent time.
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