![]() jobs, according to a study by two advocacy groups. ![]() There, Cohn explained unapologetically that Goldman had offshored its back-office staff, including payroll and IT, to Bangalore, India, now home to the firm's largest office outside New York City: "We hire people there because they work for cents on the dollar versus what people work for in the United States."Ĭandidate Trump promised to create millions of new jobs, vowing to be "the greatest jobs president that God ever created." Cohn, as Goldman Sachs's president and COO, oversaw the firm's mergers and acquisitions business that had, over the previous three years, led to the loss of at least 22,000 U.S. But Cohn laid out Goldman's very different view of offshoring at an investor conference in Naples, Florida, in November. He even threatened "retribution," a 35 percent tariff on any goods imported into the United States by a company that had moved jobs overseas. Trump raged against "offshoring" by American companies during the 2016 campaign. Trump's nationalist campaign contradicted everything Goldman Sachs and its top executives represented on the global stage. Cohn ran a giant investment bank with offices in financial capitals around the globe, one deeply committed to a world with few economic borders. The conflicts between the two men were striking. ![]() Now Cohn would be coordinating economic policy for the populist president. Aggressive and relentless, a former aluminum siding salesman and commodities broker with a nose for making money, Cohn had turned Goldman's sleepy home loan unit into what a Senate staffer called "one of the largest mortgage trading desks in the world." There, he aggressively pushed his sales team to sell mortgage-backed securities to unaware investors even as he watched over "the big short," Goldman's decision to bet billions of dollars that the market would collapse. It was Goldman Sachs that Trump singled out when he railed against a system rigged in favor of the global elite - one that "robbed our working class, stripped our country of wealth, and put money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities." Cohn, as president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, had been at the heart of it all. Trump proclaimed that Hillary Clinton was in the firm's pockets, as was Ted Cruz. Goldman Sachs had been a favorite cudgel for candidate Trump - the symbol of a government that favors Wall Street over its citizenry. Smith/AFP/Getty Images 1 GOLDMAN ALWAYS WINS Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn arrives for a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York, Nov. Within two weeks, the transition team announced that Cohn would take over as director of the president's National Economic Council. Was a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan likely to increase the deficit by a trillion dollars? Confronted by nodding heads, an unhappy president-elect said, "Why did I have to wait to have this guy tell me?" The way the moment was captured by the New York Times, among other publications, Trump was dumbfounded. ![]() ![]() Cohn, brash and bold, wired to attack any moneymaking opportunity, pitched a fix that would put Wall Street firms at the center: Private-industry partners could help infrastructure get fixed, saving the federal government from going deeper into debt. Yet the president-elect had apparently failed to appreciate that the government would need to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to fund his plans. On the campaign trail, Trump had spoken often about the importance of investing in infrastructure. But, like the man he was there to meet, he was at heart a salesman. Cohn was there to offer his views about jobs and the economy. It was the end of November, three weeks after Trump's improbable victory, and Cohn, then still the president of Goldman Sachs, was at Trump Tower presumably at the invitation of Kushner, with whom he was friendly. So were Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, and Trump's pick for secretary of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin. Steve Bannon was in the room the day Donald Trump first fell for Gary Cohn. ![]()
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