“Donald Trump can evade legal responsibility even if the conflicts of interest remain,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal nonprofit group. “His daughter and son-in-law don’t have that escape hatch.”
Mr. Kushner did resign from more than 200 positions in the partnerships and limited liability companies that make up the family-run multibillion-dollar real estate business. But the financial disclosure report shows that Mr. Kushner will remain a beneficiary of most of those same entities.
.. the Kushner Companies’ deals have become a magnet for opaque foreign money — often from parts of the world that present thorny policy questions, such as China, where Mr. Kushner’s company has actively sought investors, as well as the Middle East and Russia.
.. Mr. Kushner, by contrast, continues to hold multimillion-dollar lines of credit from institutions such as Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, while companies he is still a beneficiary of have billions of dollars in additional loans from heavily regulated institutions.
.. “The one thing Jared really ought to stay completely away from is anything having to do with Dodd-Frank,”
.. Even Mr. Bannon’s aide Julia Hahn, who is 25, reported investments worth between $1 million and $2.1 million
.. Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, had assets worth between $11 million and $44 million.
Steve Eisman of ‘The Big Short’ fame says the stock market is entering a ‘golden age’ for banks
But Eisman, who works at money manager Neuberger Berman, says the era of Trump will be a “golden age” for the banking sector. “I think over the next couple of years there will be more leverage, and this will be a golden age of investing in financial stocks,” he told CNBC during an interview early Monday in New York.
He said he was “as long as he could be” in the banking sector.
.. She said she only rates two sectors overweight (that’s code for buy among Wall Street researchers), and those are financials and technology.
.. Other market participants also have warned that rapidly rising interest rates may result in loan losses in other areas of banks’ balance sheets, including in auto lending.
The power of community banks
reformers underestimate the significant amount of political power they wield. Even in the most broken and polarized Congress in decades, acts championed by community banks sail through as standalone legislation or attached to must-pass bills with barely any notice. Rather than a bulwark against the largest banks, community banks are just as likely to support changes that would help the largest banks while providing no new protections on them. Meanwhile research shows that community banks are doing fine financially, not struggling from regulations as most coverage shows.
.. “at least 75% of the decline in new bank formation would have occurred without any regulatory change” and that low interest rates and overall economic weakness are the bigger drivers. The fact that 10-year Treasuries fell from 2.25 percent to 1.5 percent this year, a sign of continued economic headwinds, put far more pressure on bank income than any reporting statement.
Obama’s War on Inequality
.. Donald Trump: The presumptive Republican nominee — who has already declared that he will, in fact, slash taxes on the rich, whatever he may have said in the recent past — once again declared his intention to do away with Dodd-Frank, the financial reform passed during Democrats’ brief window of congressional control. Just for the record, while Mr. Trump is sometimes described as a “populist,” almost every substantive policy he has announced would make the rich richer at workers’ expense.
.. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums.
.. The middle-class society that baby boomers like me grew up in didn’t happen by accident; it was created by the New Deal, which engineered what economists call the “Great Compression,” a sharp reduction in income gaps. On one side, pro-labor policies led to a striking expansion of unions, which, along with the establishment of a fairly high minimum wage, helped raise wages, especially at the bottom. On the other side, taxes on the wealthy went up sharply, while major programs like Social Security aided working families.
.. the average federal tax rate on the top 1 percent has risen quite a lot. In fact, it’s roughly back to what it was in 1979, pre-Ronald Reagan, something nobody seems to know.
.. And even these medium-size steps put the lie to the pessimism and fatalism one hears all too often on this subject. No, America isn’t an oligarchy in which both parties reliably serve the interests of the economic elite.