.. executives in the financial industry believe the first 100 days of a Clinton administration could feature potential deal making with Republicans, who are likely to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives.
The dream deal for Wall Street would be a combination of targeted infrastructure spending that appeals mostly to Democrats and corporate and international tax reform that could bring Republicans along. The fear is that Warren would make such a deal more difficult.
.. Donors are warning that they’d pull donations to the candidate if Warren is selected, according to Politico.
Their message to moderate Republicans: She represents your values better than Trump.
One person close to Clinton said supporters of the former secretary of state drew up a list of Wall Street donors who supported Jeb Bush and other unsuccessful Republican candidates months ago but wanted to wait until Trump locked down the nomination before beginning to make the calls.
“When you think about it there is no downside to making these calls, including for Hillary herself to make then,” this person said. “They may say no but they will talk to her for half an hour about their view of the world and probably say nice things when asked about her publicly. And they might stay away from Trump.”
.. But Clinton supporters are hoping to limit Trump’s ability to tap into that money.
.. Scaramucci said he thought establishment Republicans would break down into three camps, loyalists who will donate and work for Trump, “ostrich Republicans who will stick their heads in the sand and not do anything,” and a small group that will vote and fundraise for Clinton.
.. The theory going around the financial industry is that Trump is likely to lose and that even if he wins, the real estate magnate would be constrained by both Congress and the judicial branch from executing many of his proposals on trade and immigration.
.. “There are risks with Trump and you do need to do some contingency planning. Having him as the nominee is like playing around with the puck in front of your own net in hockey. There is some danger there.”
.. Another factor that could make it harder for Clinton to peel off GOP donors is that some are holding out hope for a third-party candidate to get in the race. Some are now looking to first-term Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, as potentially that option.
.. “There’s nothing that will hurt her more with the Bernie Sanders/Bill De Blasio/Elizabeth Warren wing of the party than aligning herself with Wall Street,” said GOP donor Gregory Slayton.
In 1903 the US bullied Colombia into giving up the province that became Panama. The plan was to create a nation to serve the interests of Wall Street
“In 1903, the administration of Theodore Roosevelt created the country after bullying Colombia into handing over what was then the province of Panama. Roosevelt acted at the behest of various banking groups, among them JP Morgan & Co, which was appointed as the country’s ‘fiscal agent’ in charge of managing $10m in aid that the US had rushed down to the new nation.”
The reason, of course, was to gain access to, and control of, the canal across the Panamanian isthmus that would open in 1914 to connect the world’s two great oceans, and the commerce that sailed them.
.. JP Morgan led the American banks in gradually turning Panama into a financial centre – and a haven for tax evasion and money laundering – as well as a passage for shipping, with which these practices were at first entwined when Panama began to register foreign ships to carry fuel for the Standard Oil company in order for the corporation to avoid US tax liabilities.
.. In 1983, however, the system backfired slightly: General Manuel Noriega took power. For years, he had been a beneficiary of, and functionary for, the CIA, but he came to realise that Panama’s wealth was even better suited to an alliance with the Medellín narco-trafficking cartel of Pablo Escobar. In 1989, therefore, the US returned militarily, as it had eight decades previously, and – as Silverstein puts it – “returned to power the old banking elites, heirs of the JP Morgan legacy”.
.. “It’s important to recognise that offshore law firms like Mossack Fonseca do not operate in isolation; they rely on intermediaries, often other law firms or banks, to pass on clients and to provide support for the sophisticated cross-border structures.”
In the film, Steve Carell’s character, I believe, has a short speech in which he talks about how the crash is really about the collapse of authoritative institutions in American society. You could not trust the banks. You could not trust politicians. And you still can’t, though you have to trust them to some extent, because you cannot live otherwise. Me, I see the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church as Catholicism’s version of Wall Street’s 2007-08 crash (and by the way, I am told that the recent indictments of Franciscan priests in Pennsylvania on charges related to sex abuse are just the beginning there).
.. If Trump were turning his big guns away from immigrants and onto Wall Street (and, by extension, on the big business lobby that wants to keep the immigrant flood rolling across the border), he would be a lot better off. People want an accounting. I don’t believe Trump will give it to us, but the inchoate desire is there.
.. The bigger thing is — I regarded this crisis at bottom as a problem of incentives. People behaved badly because they were incentivized to behave badly, and the incentives haven’t really changed that much.