Gary
Rivlin, Michael Hudson
Part
1
Steve Bannon
was in the room the day Donald Trump first fell for Gary Cohn. So
were Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, and Trump’s pick for secretary
of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin. It was the end of November, three weeks
after Trump’s improbable victory, and Cohn, then still the
president of Goldman Sachs, was at Trump Tower presumably at the
invitation of Kushner, with whom he was friendly. Cohn was there to
offer his views about jobs and the economy. But, like the man he was
there to meet, he was at heart a salesman.
On the
campaign trail, Trump had spoken often about the importance of
investing in infrastructure. Yet the president-elect had apparently
failed to appreciate that the government would need to come up with
hundreds of billions of dollars to fund his plans.
Cohn, brash
and bold, wired to attack any moneymaking opportunity, pitched a fix
that would put Wall Street firms at the center: Private-industry
partners could help infrastructure get fixed, saving the federal
government from going deeper into debt.
The way the
moment was captured by the New York Times, among other publications,
Trump was dumbfounded. “Is this true?” he asked. Was a
trillion-dollar infrastructure plan likely to increase the deficit by
a trillion dollars? Confronted by nodding heads, an unhappy
president-elect said, “Why did I have to wait to have this guy
tell me?”
Within two
weeks, the transition team announced that Cohn would take over as
director of the president’s National Economic Council.
Source,
links:
https://theintercept.com/2017/09/17/goldman-sachs-gary-cohn-donald-trump-administration/
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
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