The dastardly Mr Deedes
The liberal elite’s loathing of President Trump here in New York is eclipsed only by their disdain for Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s Scots-born wife Louise Linton, 36, a manqué actress whose fondness for private air travel and designer schmutter has led the media to portray her somewhere between Cruella de Vil and barrel-bottomed reality TV star, Kim Kardashian. She and Mnuchin, 54, were recently ridiculed for posing with sheets of newly minted dollars bills, Linton’s leather-gauntleted hand caressing the wonga. A Twitter wag captioned it: ‘Louise Linton with the great love of her life. Also pictured, her husband.’ Goldman Sachs’s £20m-a-year boss Lloyd Blankfein’s future is much discussed here after dropping recent hints about retirement. Blankfein, 63, who in his 11 years at the helm has seen off both the credit crunch and cancer, suggests his joint deputies Harvey Schwartz and David Solomon could both succeed him in a power-sharing arrangement. A third contender is chief financial officer Martin Chavez, who bucks the trend among Goldman executives by having a full head of hair. Though Marty’s racy hinterland – he’s a reformed alcoholic with tattoo ‘sleeves’ – might rattle boardroom crockery. Men’s dress codes on Wall Street aren’t what they were. Forget the two-toned shirts and Brooks Brothers suits of yesteryear. It is now over-run with men casually attired in Chino trousers and fleece gilets. The fleece trend started as a self-preservation measure at SAC Capital, the former hedge fund run by Steve Cohen, 61, who maintained a low office temperature to keep his traders on their toes. Cohen was the subject of an insider trading investigation by the FBI, resulting in a record $1.8bn fine in 2013. Their ten-year cat-and-mouse chase is the basis for Showtime’s hit series Billions, which has been shooting its third series around Midtown. For the uninitiated, the Cohen character, Bobby Axelrod (played by our own Damian Lewis) is a wrong ‘un, but you can’t help root for him as he’s handsome, fun to be around and wolfishly charming. Ogre-like Cohen, I should point out, is none of these things.