Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, received a $285 million dollar payout upon leaving the bank and taking a job as the director of Trump’s National Economic Council.

Crony Capitalism writ BIG

(excerpted from an article in the Internationmal Business Times)

Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, is spearheading the administration’s infrastructure policy.  The policy is detailed in Trump’s  six-page infrastructure  initiative including  $200 billion to “incentivize additional non-Federal funding” and reward private investors for buying and maintaining government-owned infrastructure properties, like bridges, airports and toll highways.  Those initiatives echo plans laid out by Goldman Sachs in its SEC filings dating back to at least 2008. In a section of its most recent annual SEC filings about the company’s “recent and planned business initiatives,” the bank details its ongoing public infrastructure investments. “In a number of our businesses, including where we make markets, invest and lend, we directly or indirectly own interests in, or otherwise become affiliated with the ownership and operation of public services, such as airports, toll roads and shipping ports, as well as physical commodities and commodities infrastructure components, both within and outside the U.S.,” the firm said.

Mr. Cohn is spearheading the effort despite a White House official telling Bloomberg News in February that he “will recuse himself from participating in any matter directly involving his former employer.”  That pledge seemed at the time to show that Cohn was following ethics rules Trump enacted in January. Those rules require federal officials to sign an ethics pledge in which they agree to wait two years before they “participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer.”  Trump, however, has claimed the right to waive the restrictions has moved to block federal agencies from disclosing such waivers to federal ethics regulators.

For his part, Cohn has been unabashed about how lucrative the White House’s infrastructure privatization initiative could be to his former colleagues in the financial industry.

“Instead of people in cities and states and municipalities coming to us and saying, ‘Please give us money to build a project,’ and not knowing if it will get maintained, and not knowing if it will get built, we say, ‘Hey, take a project you have right now, sell it off, privatize it, we know it will get maintained, and we’ll reward you for privatizing it’, ” Cohn said, according to the Washington Post. “The bigger the thing you privatize, the more money we’ll give you.”

As Trump’s administration pushes the infrastructure privatization plan forward, Cohn is not the only administration power player with ties to Goldman Sachs. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was a partner at Goldman Sachs, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon once worked at the bank, and Trump’s SEC chairman was one of Goldman’s outside legal advisers.