Mr. Muzinich, a 39-year-old newcomer to Washington, has emerged as a central player in the Trump administration’s tax overhaul effort. The former investment banker and hedge fund manager is the Treasury point man on taxes, accompanying Mr. Mnuchin into “Big Six” meetings with top Republican lawmakers drafting the tax plan and laying out the administration’s positions on which taxes and deductions to cut or preserve.
.. He fits the mold of Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers, Mr. Mnuchin and Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, both of whom made a career on Wall Street. While not a Goldman Sachs alumnus, as they are, he brings an extensive background from the world of finance, having been a banker at Morgan Stanley and the president of Muzinich & Co., an international investment firm founded by his father.
.. His Wall Street brashness sometimes shines through when he gets into deal-making mode.
.. Mr. Muzinich, who holds an M.B.A. from Harvard and a law degree from Yale
.. In a 2007 Op-Ed article in The New York Times, Mr. Muzinich and a co-author, Eric Werker, called on Congress to offer tax credits to companies that build factories in developing countries and to offset the lost revenue with reductions in foreign aid.
.. “I think that he is pragmatic,” said Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School, where Mr. Muzinich taught before joining the Treasury Department. “He’s looking for good policy solutions, not policy positions.”
.. Some economists have scoffed at Mr. Mnuchin’s promises that tax cuts would more than pay for themselves because of the robust economic growth he says they will create. The department came under fire for removing from its web site an economic study that contradicted the secretary’s analysis of the benefits of corporate tax cuts.
The Real Reason for Republicans’ Silence on Donald Trump
Their fellow legislators have silently accepted his outrages in exchange for policies they’ve always wanted.
At his inauguration Mr. Trump said his presidency was about “transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people.” But he and his allies in Congress are transferring power to Wall Street, fossil fuel companies, the chemical industry and other special interests, and are stoking an anti-populist bonfire to incinerate protections for consumers and workers.
.. On Tuesday night the Senate, with a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence, followed the House in voting to overturn a rule that would have allowed consumers to file class-action lawsuits against banks and other financial institutions, rather than be forced to take their disputes to arbitration.
.. Mr. Trump signed an executive order allowing insurers to sell skimpy health insurance plans that do not protect people with pre-existing conditions and that will destabilize the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces.
.. His administration shortened the open enrollment period when people can buy insurance policies for next year, and slashed spending on advertising and outreach efforts.
.. Congress overturned a rule restricting the ability of coal companies to dump their mining debris into streams and other waterways, threatening rural communities, forests and wildlife.
.. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, rejected a staff recommendation to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to developmental problems in children, and started the process to overturn the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era proposal to reduce planet-warming emissions from power plants.
.. Congress repealed a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that sought to expose and limit corruption by requiring oil and mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments.
Silicon Valley Vs. Wall Street: Can the New Long-Term Stock Exchange Disrupt Capitalism?
Tech luminaries back new exchange that rewards shares with more voting power the longer investors own them
.. the voting power of shares increases the longer investors own them. Firms listed on the exchange would need to use such a structure, often called “tenure voting,” while abiding by numerous other rules, such as a ban on tying executive pay to the company’s short-term financial performance... skeptics wonder whether the LTSE is just another way for tech founders and elite Silicon Valley investors to maintain control at the expense of other shareholders. One leading New York hedge-fund manager who asked not to be named called tenure voting “disgusting” and said it would enable managers to duck accountability... The LTSE is funded by a range of venture-capital firms, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and Greylock Partners, and individual investors including former Twitter Inc. CEO Dick Costolo, AOL co-founder Steve Case and Groupon Inc. founder Andrew Mason. The firm says it has raised $19 million from around 70 investors in all... SEC Chairman Jay Clayton .. has voiced concerns about the nearly 50% drop in the number of U.S. public companies over the past two decades—a trend that is partly due to companies choosing to stay private for longer... executives’ bonuses couldn’t be tied to financial-performance targets over periods of less than one year. If the executives are paid in company stock, the shares couldn’t fully vest for at least five years... they would be barred from releasing quarterly earnings guidance.. the voting power of his or her shares would grow over time, capped at 10 times the power of ordinary common stock after a decade... The voting structure will depress the share price of any company listed on the LTSE, said Neal Wolkoff, former CEO of the American Stock Exchange. “Fewer people will want to buy into a company where there’s entrenched management,” he said... In his view, tenure voting is better than the solution favored by some Silicon Valley firms: severely limiting the voting power of ordinary shareholders through two or more share classes.Snap Inc., for instance, has a controversial multiple-class share structure in which shareholders who buy the company’s common stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange don’t get voting rights at all.
Erik Prince: Trump’s ‘Instincts Are Good’ on Iran, but ‘He Gets Dragged Back by Some of His Advisers’
Erik Prince joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the Iran nuclear deal, chances that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps will be designated a terrorist organization
.. Prince said failing to apply such a designation to the IRGC would be “ludicrous.”
“These guys have been killing Americans, specifically, since soon after they were formed in the early 1980s,” he pointed out.
- “The Marine barracks in Beirut, 243 Americans in 1983; kidnapped, tortured, videotaped it,
- the CIA station chief in Beirut in the 1980s;
- blew up the U.S. embassy there,
- Khobar Towers, and then even
- the last ten years that the U.S. was in Iraq.”
.. All of the explosive formed penetrators, it’s a very very nasty roadside bomb,” he elaborated on Iraq. “It’s not an improvised explosive. It’s very much a manufactured explosive, designed to cut through even the very expensive armor on an Abrams tank. Literally, the IRGC is responsible for killing and maiming hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers in Iraq.”
.. “And we still don’t designate these guys a terrorist organization. Why? Because they’re worried that this terrorist organization might actually reciprocate and carry out a terrorist attack against America. It’s ludicrous,” he said.
.. “As part of this nuclear deal, they were supposed to make all nuclear facilities open to inspection. They’re cheating on that. They are continuing to develop their ballistic missile technology.”
“You also have to realize that Iran and North Korea, when it comes to nuclear weapons development, are totally in sync and in parallel,” he added. “When the North Koreans crank off a nuke underground, the Iranians are there observing it, and they’ve provided considerable funding for it.”
.. as recently as October 1, 12 days ago, an American soldier was killed in Iraq by an explosive formed penetrator. They have been sticking it to us since 1979 and will continue to do so. What’s announced today will not really reject the Iranian nuclear deal. It will dump it back on Congress, which really won’t do anything on it,” he predicted.
.. “What Congress should have done – what Senator Corker should have forced – is that when the Obama administration pushed the Iran nuclear deal, they should have forced a vote in the Senate,” he said. “If we’re going to treat it like a treaty, vote it up or down like a treaty.
.. If the president went with his initial instincts on this stuff, he’d be hitting it out of the park,” said Prince, who had proposed a plan to President Trump for using private security forces instead of more military personnel in Afghanistan. “Some of these very Establishment foreign policy advisers are giving advice indiscernible from what they’d be giving Hillary Clinton. It’s taken him off track.”
.. Prince described Iran as “a society that puts a thousand stitches into a square inch in a Persian rug.”
“They understand methodical. They are very patient, and very deliberate, and they continue to move the ball in their direction, as this so-called nuclear deal did.
.. “As part of the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, there are supposed to be complete inspections, but secret nuclear sites scattered about the country – it’s a very large country, a lot of remote, rugged terrain – certainly those aren’t being inspected,” he said.
.. “If we make deals with people who are actively trying to kill us, who continue to call the United States the Great Satan, that hasn’t changed. They continue to kill Americans, as recently as October 1. They are not our friends, far from it. If we’re not careful, they will continue to eat our lunch, one bite at a time,” he warned.
.. but will not “sanction the entire IRGC as a terrorist organization.”
“Those are the guys that are driving this nuclear program,” he said. “If you sanction the entire IRGC, you can then go after all of their front companies and money-making apparatus, which trades through the world, through West Africa, money laundering for the drug cartels to front businesses in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East. You can start to crimp off their financing.”
.. “If you don’t do that, if you don’t call a terrorist a terrorist, you can’t really take action against them,”
.. Prince humorously identified it as the “bureaucratic SITS method: Show Interest, Then Stall.”
.. “They are desperately trying to secure the Shia Crescent that goes from Iran all the way to Lebanon, where they can continue to arm Hezbollah, their surrogate there, with larger and larger rockets to dominate Israel, and Jordan for that matter. They’re continuing to advance in their dominance in Yemen and elsewhere.”
.. “We don’t have a beef with the Iranian people, believe me,” Prince added. “The Iranian people want to be Western. They want to have freedom, and drink beer, and listen to rock and roll. They are effectively led by a government that looks more and more like the SS in Nazi Germany – an Iranian Shia fascist government that is far from elected, that imposes itself on every aspect of the Iranian citizen’s life, to the detriment of what should be a very proud and very prosperous country.”
.. Turning to Afghanistan, Prince said President Trump’s decision to send another 4,000 U.S. troops is “unlikely to move the needle.”
.. “When Secretary Mattis traveled to Afghanistan just a couple of weeks ago for an update, he landed in Kabul, and he has to get on a helicopter to fly one mile across the town to where the U.S. base is. He can’t get in a vehicle to drive, just like any person from the U.S. Embassy operating there has to take a helicopter from the Kabul airport into downtown, because it’s not safe to drive,” he observed.
.. “And within two hours of Secretary Mattis landing, 40 rockets hit Kabul airport, in a five-hour firefight to try to secure the airport again,” he added. “This is not what winning looks like.”
.. “I was there on the ball when the president said in his inaugural speech, ‘We’re going to drive Islamic terrorism off the face of the Earth.’ I don’t think he intended that means the terrorists are driving captured U.S. vehicles across the Afghan terrain,” said Prince.