THE BILLIONAIRES TAKE OVER
As the Left rages, Goldman Sachs chiefs and plutocrats dominate Trump’s Cabinet. And guess what? Wall St’s soaring
The astonishing stock market rally which started the day Donald Trump was elected refuses to die. For the first time in modern financial history, all four Wall Street indexes, a true measure of American optimism, stand at their highest-ever level — with the blue-chip Dow Jones nudging 20,000 this week. But that market enthusiasm has not stopped Trump’s powerful media and political opponents raging against a slew of appointments the President-elect has made to his first Cabinet.
Those Left-wing critics have decried his team as a politically inexperienced government of billionaires and generals — the wealthiest administration in U.S history.
‘It is a throwback to the “greed is good” mentality,’ complained the liberal pressure group People for the American Way.
Minority public interest groups, climate change activists and those who oppose closer ties to Russia are especially apoplectic about Trump’s latest choice — the world’s most powerful oil boss, Rex Tillerson, to be Secretary of State, the most influential post in the Cabinet.
Giving the role of what is effectively Foreign Secretary to the chairman and chief executive of giant exxon-Mobil leaves hugely experienced political operators such as former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the dust. But Trump promised a Cabinet of the best and brightest minds in business — and he’s delivering.
All this has caused America’s high-minded, liberal commentariat to call for the smelling salts. But what they fail to recognise is that both Wall Street, and ordinary Americans — hundreds of millions of whom own shares either directly or through their pension funds — actually like what they are seeing.
That’s why the Dow Jones, Standard & Poor’s index of the top 500 American firms, the Nasdaq index of technology stocks and the Russell index of 2,000 second-tier corporations are all at unprecedented levels.
Behind this optimism is a belief that Trump is creating a team which knows how to make money, and will throw off the burden of regulation — from clean air diktats to complex laws aimed to protect water, food and workplace safety — which have put unnecessary brakes on the great American engine.
high taxes and red tape have too often meant that the wealthiest individuals and companies have moved their money into overseas havens.
But it’s not just the money men who are giving Trump’s enemies apoplexy. They are worried about some of his other choices — notably retired Marine Corps general James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis as Defence Secretary. But Mattis, a former Nato and Iraq War commander, would be one of the more mainstream figures in the Cabinet.
Although Trump’s nominees must be approved by the Senate, one particularly provocative appointment is Oklahoma’s attorney general Scott Pruitt as head of the environmental Protection Agency, which oversees human health and the environment.
This climate change sceptic is willing to ditch the Clean Air Act (which protects human health and the environment from air pollution and was used to impose billions of dollars in fines on BP for the 2010 Deepwater horizon oil disaster).
Trump believes President Obama’s obsession with closing down the coal industry and heaping governmental restrictions on fracking and oil extraction has severely damaged the fossil- fuel based industries. Pruitt and Tillerson’s appointments signal a new era of drilling, and the continued reliance of burning of fossil fuels.
During his campaign, Trump railed against investment bank Goldman Sachs, largely as a way of trying to embarrass hillary Clinton because she had received large sums for making speeches to the Wall Street firm.
Yet now he has installed three former Goldman executives at the heart of his economic team, to deliver Ronald Reagan-style tax cuts and an
infrastructure building programme which would do credit to Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal in the Thirties helped Americans who had suffered in the Depression.
FORMER Goldman trader Steven Mnuchin has the key job of Treasury Secretary. It will be his job to deliver on Trump’s promised tax reductions, and he’ll work alongside his former Goldman colleague Steve Bannon, chairman of Right-wing website Breitbart News, who will be the White House’s chief strategist.
Most impressive of the Goldman trio is Gary Cohn, heir-apparent to be chairman of Goldman Sachs, who has been persuaded to head the National Economic Council, which will advise Trump on U.S. and global economic policy.
Among the most intriguing of the economic policymakers is the selection of 79-year-old billionaire Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary.
Known as ‘the king of bankruptcy’ for his skill in extracting value from failing businesses, he would be at the heart of Trump’s trade policy. His job will be to liaise with big business and encourage those firms which have closed factories in the U.S. and moved manufacturing to cheap labour countries such as Mexico to relocate back home — and, if necessary, punish those that won’t.
Ross is well known in the City of London. He made big profits out of buying the healthy part of the Britain’s Northern Rock’s mortgage book after it collapsed.
He’s also among the biggest backers of the Metro Bank, whose branches are opening on High Streets across the UK.
Trump is not the first president to ask business plutocrats to chart the future direction of America’s economy and diplomacy. Reagan and Bill Clinton put Wall Street bosses in charge of the Treasury in preference to politicians and econ- omists. But Trump seems to have taken this preference for rich colleagues to a whole new level.
The new Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is the daughter-inlaw of the founder of a cleaning products empire with an estimated wealth of £4 billion.
The person who’ll oversee much of Trump’s infrastructure revolution is Elaine Chao, daughter of a billionaire shipping magnate who has served on the board of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and America’s largest bank, Wells Fargo.
The irony is that they will be serving at the pleasure of a president elected in large part by the blue-collar workers of America. But Trump understands that, whereas in Britain there is often inverse snobbery about great wealth, such prejudices are far less prevalent in American society, where there is huge respect for the self-made.
That view is not necessarily shared by the liberal elite on the East and West coasts. But give millions of American voters an experienced general or a billionaire at the heart of power and they couldn’t be happier.
And if this controversial Cabinet does deliver growth, jobs and greater prosperity, as Trump is promising, he might just do the unthinkable — and get elected again.