The former No. 2 at Goldman Sachs led his bank through a crisis that makes the infighting on Trump’s team seem pale.
Anyone who has ever worked for a Wall Street investment bank knows what it takes to get to the top of one: cunning, smarts, an ability to produce revenue and Machiavellian political skills. And that’s why it’s really no surprise, if you think about it, that two longtime former Goldman Sachs executives—Gary Cohn and Dina Powell—are finding their influence, and access, rising inside Donald Trump’s increasingly polarized White House.
The chattering class seems aglow with the possibility that Cohn will soon replace Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff. Cohn, of course, is way too clever to engage in any kind of speculation of this kind. On paper, though, Trump’s chief economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council appears to be the perfect apprentice: He’s rich, independent, intelligent, decisive and knows (mostly) how to be a loyal No. 2. He can also be gruff, abrasive and aggressive, and he’s been known to employ that classic banker intimidation pose: one foot on your desk so you’ve got to stare at his crotch.He also seems to have that athletic “look” that Trump prefers in his teammates: 6-foot-2, powerful, bald and proud of it. His oft-told story, including to Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling 2013 book David and Goliath, shows why Cohn, 56, fared so well at Goldman Sachs, a place that prides itself on finding, and nurturing, the highly competitive and ambitious sons and daughters of the middle class and turning them into superstars.
But unlike Steve Bannon, another fellow with a less-than-elite background who made it to both Goldman Sachs and the Trump White House, Cohn knows how to maneuver his way successfully through a highly competitive battlefield and come out on top, if not unscathed. Let’s face it, you don’t get to the penultimate spot at Goldman Sachs, and stay there for 10 years, without having some serious political chops. These are serving Cohn well now, as is his experience during the crucible of the 2008 financial crisis, when he and a few other top Goldman executives formulated a strategy that saved the firm. It was premised, Cohn told me, on acknowledging a painful reality that was dismissed or ignored by his contemporaries at other banks: Mortgage-backed securities that were larding up portfolios all over Wall Street weren’t worth anywhere near what people thought. So he got rid of them, an example of his pragmatism trumping his ego. But he wasn’t shy about flexing his muscles either. He let Goldman’s hedge fund counterparties know, during the worst of the financial crisis, that he would not forget it if they decided to stop trading with the firm, which would have been crippling and was happening to other firms. Bannon, the zealous nationalist with an affection for war rhetoric and Cohn’s erstwhile rival in the White House, has his own Goldman career, though not as storied as Cohn’s. What Cohn has, that Trump wants, is a record of notching wins in adversarial circumstances, and that’s something that Bannon has not achieved in the early days of the administration.
Source: Politico
The post How the Financial Collapse Steeled Gary Cohn for the White House appeared first on Compliancex.
April 24, 2017 at 06:55PM
from The Compliance Exchange
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