Trump’s Big Con
And the winner is…Goldman Sachs! Fueled by outrage over the bankster-wrought economic misery exploited by Donald Trump’s faux populism, the 2016 Presidential election was nuttier than vaudeville. But it was business as usual on Wall Street the morning after.
Even before moving into the White House, Trump revealed that Goldman may run the Treasury Department again, just as it had under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The market responded: Goldman’s stock value rose 33% in the first month after the election.
It likely would have done so even if Hillary Clinton had won. Trump branded his opponent a Wall Street tool for making three speeches to Goldman Sachs execs in which there was nary a word of criticism for the bankers who had inflicted so much pain on the nation with the subprime mortgage crisis. Instead she lauded the “sacrifice” of former Goldman honcho Robert Rubin, who took a temporary pay cut to serve as her husband’s Treasury secretary and initiated the sweeping deregulation of Wall Street that brought on the Great Recession.
The story was depressingly the same with Clinton’s successor. George W. Bush appointed Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson to be his Treasury secretary. Talk about a Wall Street tool. Paulson presided over the bailout of the banks that had marketed fraudulent mortgage-backed securities while ignoring the plight of tens of millions of ordinary folks who lost jobs and homes.
