Kick the Cohn?
Blankfein isn’t ‘Yellen’ in his support
Where’s the love, Lloyd? Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein, asked if Gary Cohn — his longtime No. 2— would make a good Federal Reserve boss, gave a less-than-definitive endorsement of his pal.
“No one’s perfect, but he’s the best I know,” Blankfein said Wednesday during a talk with journalists at the bank’s Big Apple headquarters.
“He’d be a different kind of person” from Fed Chair Janet Yellen, Blankfein added. “He’s not an academic. I don’t know that he reads a lot of policy papers, let alone writes them.”
Blankfein’s lukewarm comments came weeks after President Trump floated Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, for the role atop the US central bank.
It’s unclear whether Cohn will ever get the job, however. Trump has reportedly cooled on the ex-Goldman banker after Cohn criticized the president’s response to white supremacists gathering in Charlottesville, Va., last month.
The top job is set to open up when Yellen’s term expires at the end of January.
To be sure, Blankfein also praised Cohn.
“Gary is very, very capable,” Blankfein noted. “There is nobody who has a better sense of markets, or the consequence that decisions will have on people’s behavior who act and are guided by market forces.”
In the half-hour event, Blankfein also landed a few thinly veiled jabs at Trump, saying that “there is a line in which populism can cross over into demagoguery.”
“Demagoguery is the crossover where populism becomes a bad thing, and people make things up, and they assign responsibilities that aren’t fair and justified, and scapegoat communities,” Blankfein said. “And then it becomes a very bad thing.”
Blankfein emphasized he was not “predicting” the US would fall into that situation — but added that he also didn’t think it was too farfetched, either.
“I‘d say if you wanted to forestall bad events, the best thing to do is anticipate them and try to correct them before they get close,” he said.
Blankfein has taken to trolling the president on Twitter in recent months, blasting his policies on immigration and the environment, and Trump’s “equivalency” after the Charlottesville, Va., rally that left one counterprotester dead.