Gary Cohn came back from the dead
Former Goldman Sachs exec and current White House Globalist Castaway Gary Cohn is back from the beach. After keeping a low profile since leaving the Trump administration, Cohn showed up on CNBC and pulled no punches:
“I think that people are concerned that the economic policies of Washington are not as clear this year as they were last year.”
Translation: People had a clue what was going on when I was in charge.
Cohn embraced the “globalist” moniker he was given by Trump and questioned the wisdom of tariffs that harm the many while helping the few, adding, “tens of thousands of more people that are employed in using aluminum than in manufacturing aluminum.”
I remain extremely curious about Cohn’s next career move.
PIMCO checked in on impact investing
In a previous life, I used to cover the United Nations. War, famine and disease were all topics of daily news consumption. That can make for some less-than-uplifting days on the job.
One of the biggest topics at the time was the plan put forth by the United Nations to combat all the world’s ills. The plan was known back then as the Millennium Development Goals; and has since morphed into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Today, PIMCO released an analysis of how effective its own Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) initiative has been at helping the UN meets its SDGs.
It is a pretty thorough analysis, so dive on in.
One thing that jumped off the page at me is the composition of the 17 SDGs and how they don’t mesh all that well with the policies being crafted and implemented by the Trump Administration.
Take a look:
I can only spot two SDGs the White House would unequivocally embrace. Can you name them?
I don’t know. It just leaves me a little flummoxed that goals that are appealing to a corporate titan like PIMCO seem to be contradictory to the goals of a pro-business leader like President Trump.
Bloomberg opted for post-Brexit life in Amsterdam
My Brexit news-sniffing skills must be rusty, because I have to admit that this story fooled me.
I was all in to learn that Bloomberg was picking Amsterdam for its post-Brexit European trading headquarters. I love Amsterdam, it has unapproachable history when it comes to trading and it already has all the infrastructure in place for Bloomberg to hit the ground running with an operation that already handles more than 300 billion pounds of interest rate swaps per month.
And then I read the second-to-last paragraph:
“Mr Macdonald said Bloomberg would staff the operation with a mixture of people transferring from London and new hires. The number of people likely to be based in Amsterdam is around 10.”
Soooooo… I have repeatedly mocked people for getting all excited about headlines lamenting the exodus of jobs from London when the job total was only dozens or a few hundred. And today I got fooled into reading a story about less than 10 jobs leaving London. Ugh.
WYWW Appetizers
- Bitcoinitis!
- A political move by President Trump likely to cause job losses at Boeing.