Hillary Clinton Aides’ Wall Street Ties Raise Economic Policy Doubts
The Wall Street connections of two of Hillary Clinton’s top State Department aides are forcing progressives to ask how the economic policy of a future Clinton White House would be any different from that which brought the economy to the brink in 2008.
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The Wall Street connections of two of Hillary Clinton’s top aides at the State Department are forcing progressives to ask how the economic policy of a future Clinton White House would be any different from that which brought the economy to the brink in 2008.
The Guardian reports:
The former aides, Tom Nides and Robert Hormats, have shuttled between government and Wall Street for years. Nides, who is frequently described as a Clinton confidant, is a longtime Morgan Stanley executive who served as deputy secretary of state for management and resources from 2011 to 2013 before returning to Morgan Stanley. Nides is also the former chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (Sifma), the main lobbying group for Wall Street in Washington DC.
Hormats, a former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served as under secretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment from 2009 to 2013. He is currently vice-chairman of Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm founded by the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the progressive advocacy group Democracy for America expressed his angst about the influence of the two in Clinton world. “It’s hard to imagine how a presidential candidate is going to seriously confront the powerful, greed-driven interests on Wall Street when they’re taking advice and staffing cabinet posts with people who just clocked out of the same big banks and investment firms that made bundles from wrecking our economy,” Sroka said. …
Hormats, who has been described as Clinton’s “economic guru”, boasted of the Clinton State Department’s support of the business community in a 2013 interview. He is also on the record being supportive of partial privatization of social security. Hormats also touted the benefits of “widescale deregulation” in the 1990s and strongly supported increased trade with China.
Read more here.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
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