Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Wall Street Bull Statue in Lower Manhattan
On December 2 President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team sent out a press release advising that he had formed a business advisory panel “which is composed of some of America’s most highly respected and successful business leaders, will be called upon to meet with the President frequently to share their specific experience and knowledge as the President implements his plan to bring back jobs and Make America Great Again.”
In fact, according to the Chair of the panel, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman and CEO of Blackstone, a private equity/hedge fund/investment bank headquartered in New York City, it was Schwarzman who actually selected the members of the panel and Trump went with the full group he had selected. (See Schwarzman’s Bloomberg TV interview here.)
Aside from being a disparate cacophony of voices from wildly different businesses ranging from Boeing, a commercial jet manufacturer, to the Cleveland Clinic with no representation at all from labor or consumers, the panel has an outsized representation from the financial sector with one particularly curious member.
Of the 16 member group, 7 members hail from the financial/investment sector. In addition to Schwarzman, those members are:
Paul Atkins, CEO, Patomak Global Partners, LLC, Former Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission;
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