The Scene
The rumors began the moment Larry Fink was spotted in Washington earlier this month: Was the BlackRock CEO in town auditioning to be Kamala Harris’s Treasury Secretary?
He wasn’t — he was previewing for legislators an AI-focused fund that BlackRock was launching with Microsoft — but such is the mood in Washington, where a razor-close presidential contest has New York’s financial elite eyeing Washington jobs after a decade in the political wilderness. Wall Street centrists haven’t seen career opportunities this promising since George W. Bush’s administration, which plucked generously from their ranks. Kamala Harris’s business-friendly(ish) tone and her swing through New York this weekend have amped up the jockeying.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden both promoted from within, choosing sitting or recent officials like Tim Geithner, Jack Lew, and Janet Yellen for top economic jobs. Democrats’ last big private-sector hiring gamble — the nomination of investment banker Antonio Weiss to a Treasury post a decade ago — crumbled under a progressive backlash.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump staffed his finance-related agencies thinly and mostly from outside the Acela corridor, drafting in Steven Mnuchin from Los Angeles, “king of bankruptcy” Wilbur Ross from the corporate fringes, and Andy Puzder, his first pick to run the Labor Department, from the C-suite at Hardee’s.
Now a small group of prominent Wall Street lawyers and bankers have emerged as major Harris donors, planting themselves squarely in the eyesight of a potential transition team if she wins. Centerview’s Blair Effron and Lazard’s Peter Orszag shepherded Harris’ Sunday lunch with about 75 business and business-adjacent donors at Cipriani’s, the finance-industry haunt in Manhattan. Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp is a major bundler.
Another Lazard executive, Ray McGuire, ferried Brian Nelson, one of Harris’s top economic advisers, around New York City last week, organizing roundtables that included Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray and Thomas Nides, Evercore’s Roger Altman, investor Josh Steiner, and others, people familiar with the matter said.
On the other side of the aisle, Jay Clayton, a registered independent who ran the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2017 to 2020, has told friends that he’s interested in the CIA director job should Trump win, people familiar with the matter said. His frequent partner in media appearances, former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn, is also likely in the mix for a Cabinet or agency job. Neither commented for this story.
In this article:
Liz’s view
Wall Street’s Democrats — an anti-tariff, socially liberal crowd wary of both deficits and regulators — may be overly optimistic about their job prospects. For one thing, Harris’s policy agenda is only just taking shape, and it’s still unclear how much daylight she can afford to put between herself and Biden on economic matters that are top of mind for unhappy voters.
For another, Republicans’ right flank and Democrats’ left flank increasingly agree that big business is bad. JD Vance is a fan of Biden’s antitrust cop, Lina Khan, and both Bernie Sanders and Trump want to cap the interest rates that credit cards can charge.
Depending on which party controls the Senate after November, those voices could be loud, and it’s hard to see Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, voting to approve any Wall Streeter for a cabinet job. Liberal Democrats in 2017 opposed the nomination of Clayton, who then pursued a lot of their policies, like protecting retail investors from themselves and forcing brokers to disclose conflicts of interest when pitching investments.
A tight Senate would put a premium on expediency. That might benefit Wall Streeters like Nides, a former Morgan Stanley executive now at Blackstone who was unanimously confirmed as Biden’s ambassador to Israel. But it benefits consensus picks like Gina Raimondo, the current Commerce secretary, and current Biden economic adviser Lael Brainard more.
Progressives’ dislike of financiers led the Biden administration to fill key roles with people who were, at times, disconnected from realities on the ground. Yellen is an accomplished economist, but her public appearances around the 2023 regional-banking crisis — particularly her comments on the Sunday shows over that key weekend — failed to clarify or calm things. At the SEC, Gary Gensler, a distant Goldman alum but one who proved his progressive chops over several administrations, has a pile of unfinalized rules and many more unlikely to survive court challenges after he sought to expand the agency’s role.
Mnuchin’s past as a mortgage trader, a deep and devious market that depends on government support, came in handy as he responded to the pandemic. Hank Paulson, the last Wall Street executive to run Treasury, can be faulted for missing the warning signs of the 2008 crisis, but he knew what to do when it came. Everyone bashes the revolving door, but the people going through it tend to know how the system works.
Room for Disagreement
Wall Streeters don’t tend to fare well against government ideologues, who are likely to fill other key roles in a Trump or Harris administration. Mnuchin and Cohn sparred repeatedly with Trump’s trade hawk, Peter Navarro. And while the business community is urging Harris to replace Khan at the FTC, the politics make that hard.
Notable
- Media tycoon Barry Diller apologized for calling Khan a “dope” but promised to use his influence against her — New York Times