Wasn't Wall Street Was Supposed to Have a Veto Over Trump's Policies?
Now they do not dare to complain on the record at all...
This is not something I had on my Bingo card last October: that if Trump won plutocratic figures like Michael Cembalest of JPMorgan and Larry Fink of BlackRock would performatively display a good definition of how we know that the Trump administration is neofascist:
Antoine Gara, Amelia Pollard, James Fontanella-Khan, & Eric Platt: How Wall Street got Donald Trump wrong <https://www.ft.com/content/e0b28b01-3cdb-4c64-be28-93f51b4a21e6>: ‘Top executives are now particularly careful with their words…. “They’re afraid of him… They don’t want to end up with any legal action against their bank or their family. And they’ve been told by their boards: keep your mouth shut,” says [Anthony] Scaramucci. “By the way, we don’t even have law firms that can defend you because every major law firm just got dunked on by the president.”
Michael Cembalest, the chair of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan, hinted at this chilling effect during a presentation to clients this month. “This is the first time I’ve ever had to do a call where I had to think about the things that I was saying, not just in terms of how they reflect our views on markets and economics…. I had to think about how they might reflect on the firm and some of its colleagues at a time when people are being held accountable for their views and the things that they say in ways that they probably shouldn’t be…”
BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink declined to answer a question last week at an Economic Club of New York event that sought his views on Trump’s use of executive orders to attack law firms, including BlackRock’s go-to legal adviser, Skadden. “Let’s move on,” the head of the world’s largest asset manager said…
Michael is at least saying that there is a lot you should take away from this presentation that I am not saying. Larry is just not saying.
This is something that none of them foresaw would come from their voting for Trump, again.
How did they get it wrong? As I like to say, they made the mistake of thinking that kleptocrats regard plutocrats as their friends, rather than regarding plutocrats as their prey.
And so now here we are. Who can the Financial Times find to go on the record with respect to how huge a disaster Donald Trump is?
“one attendee connected to Trump at the time…”
“one Wall street executive says…”
“billionaire hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb, and Cliff Asness aired their frustrations on X…”
“Trump’s former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross told the FT: ‘It’s a fairly unconventional way of measuring tariffs”…’
“one person close to him…”
“He wants to end the global trading system and weaken the US. He wants to Brexit the United States from the rest of the world,” Anthony Scaramucci… briefly Trump’s White House communications director…. “This is the stupidest economic policy that the United States has ever come up with…”
“Given our state of ignorance and all we don’t know, [investing now] is like betting on the outcome of the Super Bowl when you don’t know which teams are playing or who any of their players are,” Howard Marks, the co-founder of Oaktree Capital, says…”
“the head of a private investment firm…”
And even those who do criticize in public are eager to reverse it and come back to the fold whenever they can. I will not say that Bill Ackman ever had any dignity, but he lost all chance of every gaining any when he wrote:
Bill Ackman: ‘brilliantly executed”… “Textbook, Art of the Deal”… “The advantage of @realDonaldTrump's strategy is that we now recognize our favored trading partners and identify the problematic ones. This creates an ideal scenario for trade talks over the next three months”… “Thank you on behalf of all Americans…”
And Dan Loeb is eager to grasp at any straw:
Dan Loeb: “Third Point anticipates that the investment landscape for equities will remain advantageous… despite the unconventional methods this Administration employs in communicating and implementing policies…”
Only Cliff Asness is willing to stick to his guns.
Great wealth and associated social power does not give them strength and courage, but rather fear that they might lose something of what they have—even though they have a lot, and Trump does not have the energy to injure more than one or two of them.
This is, I think, a good touchstone.
I confess that it is not until this year that I understood how Friedrich von Hayek had, in his Road to Serfdom, gotten it so completely wrong in believing that only a centrally-planned economy could create complete cynicism with respect to truth, claiming that only in such does:
The word truth itself ceases to have its old meaning… [but] becomes something to be laid down by authority… and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organised effort require it. The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry and of the belief in the power of rational conviction, the way in which differences of opinion in every branch of knowledge become political issues… are all things which one must personally experience—no short description can convey their extent…. [Such] contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established, but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith…
Or, in the case of our current barons of Wall Street, an anti-collectivist faith. If they were at all concerned with one another, they could band together and would not need to be more fearful, would they?
Henry Farrell provides perhaps a glimmer of hope:
Henry Farrell: : ‘The more powerful and unruly the authoritarian becomes, the more readily they can make promises or threats. Equally, the less credible those promises or threats become…. Absolute power implies absolute impunity: if I enjoy such power, I have no incentive to behave trustworthily to anyone… [and] no-one has any incentive to trust me…. As an aspiring authoritarian move[s] closer to unbounded control… [he] need[s] to artfully balance the benefits that my power can bring to my allies with the fear those allies may reasonably have over what happens should that power be turned against them…
But only a glimmer. That requires that the authoritarian be something other than a bundle of hatreds on a constant hair trigger. With such—which Trump is—it is very easy to convince everyone with something to lose that if they keep their head down, somebody else will become the target of the day.