Donald Trump's Economic Advisory Team - Not So Anti-Estbalishment

A little over two weeks ago, the Trump campaign announced the members of Trump's Economic Advisory Council. Not much attention is being paid anyone in the MSM, the alt Right media or ATS but if there were any doubts about just how anti-establishment Donald Trump isn't, this list should put them to rest.

TRUMP CAMPAIGN ANNOUNCES TRUMP ECONOMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL

Donald J. Trump is also pleased to announce his economic advisory team comprised of some of the top economists in the country as well as the most successful industry leaders in finance, real estate and technology. Creating jobs and fixing the Obama Administration’s economic failures of the last eight years is a fundamental reason that Mr. Trump is seeking the presidency.

Members of the economic team include individuals with unparalleled experience and success in business including Tom Barrack, Andy Beal, Stephen M. Calk, Steve Feinberg, Harold Hamm, Howard Lorber, Steve Mnuchin, John Paulson, Wilbur Ross, and Steve Roth. Additionally, the team includes highly respected advisers Dan DiMicco, David Malpass, Stephen Moore, and Peter Navarro

Thomas Barrack Jr.

Billonaire Tom Barrack is the founder, chairman and CEO of Colony Capital, the world's 3rd largest private equity real estate fund. He has DEEP ties to the GOP establishment.

Wikipedia:

His first job was at the law firm of Herbert W. Kalmbach, President Richard Nixon's personal lawyer.[3] He then worked in Saudi Arabia for the Fluor Corporation.[3] He then learned Arabic and worked for Saudi princes. Shortly after, he helped open diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Haiti, then ruled by Jean-Claude Duvalier, at the request of investor Lonnie Dunn.[3]

Barrack served as Deputy Undersecretary of the United States Department of the Interior under James G. Watt in the Reagan administration.[2][5]

Barrack was later a principal with the Robert M. Bass Group.[2][4][5] In 1990, he founded Colony Capital, and received initial investment from Bass and GE Capital, and later from Eli Broad, Merrill Lynch, and Koo Chen-fu.[3] He has invested some $200 million in Middle East real estate, $534 million in non-performing German real estate loans, and a $24 million loan to photographer Annie Leibovitz.[7] He also owns the Neverland Ranch.[7] Through Colony Capital, he runs a $25 billion portfolio of assets, from the Fairmont Raffles Hotels International hotel chain in Asia, the Aga Khan's former resort in Sardinia, Resorts International Holdings, One&Only Resorts, Atlantis, etc.[3]

He's a master of the sort of grassroots anti-estbalishment fundraising that the Clintons know nothing about:

Center for Public Integrity:

In May, he hosted Trump at his home in California for a fundraising event at which guests paid $25,000 or more to attend. He has also personally donated $415,000 to Trump's joint fundraising committee

Despite backing Trump, he's a big fan of Clinton (or maybe he just hedges his bets?):

In a July interview, Barrack said Hillary Clinton was “phenomenally qualified” and called her ground game “unbelievable,” but said he supports Trump because he’s seen firsthand his skills as a negotiator, businessman and friend.

Daniel Andrew Beal

Billionaire Andy Beal is a little out of place on this list. He doesn't have any deep political ties that I could find, he hasn't been embroiled in any major scandals, didn't attend any ivy league schools (dropped out of Michigan State where he was majoring in mathematics). By all accounts, he's a honest-to-God self-made man. He's also a prodigious number theorist (the Beal Conjecture) and high stakes poker player of no small renown (as in $10-$20 million dollar games vs poker legends aka "the corporation"). He has been called the "Warren Buffet of banking" and is the owner of the country's largest private bank. Also he made a killing on some of these other schmuck's disasters:

ZeroHedge

Standing outside the glass-domed headquarters of his Plano, Texas, bank in March, D. Andrew Beal presses a cellphone to his ear. He's discussing a deal to buy mortgage securities. In just a few minutes, the deal's done: His Beal Bank will buy $15 million of face value for $5 million. A few hours earlier he reviewed details on a $500 million loan his bank is making to a company heading into bankruptcy--the biggest he's ever done. A few floors above, workers are bent over computer screens preparing bids for chunks of $600 million in assets dumped by two imploded financial firms. In the last 15 months, Beal has purchased $800 million of loans from failed banks, probably more than anyone else.

The two are long time acquaintances and oh yeah, the man Trump has said will be in charge of trade with China has loaned Trump about half a billion dollars.


Stephen Calk

Steve Calk's bios aren't terribly revealing but he doesn't seem to have any serious political ties. His father's job took the family to Europe for part of his childhood. He went to West Point Prep (nominated by Congressman Phillip Crane), got his bachelor's from Univ of Illinois Urbana, went into the Army a commissioned officer and was a helicopter pilot for 16 years. While serving in the reserves, he started a mortgage banking company (no further details) through which he became wealthy. Started a bank with his brother called Chicago Bancorp. Chicago Bancorp was one of the largest privately held retail mortgage banks in the country until it dissolved in 2012. Now he's the founder, chairman and CEO of the Federal Savings Bank (also in Chicago).

One blip in the news from 2014. He, his brother and both the dissolved Chicago Bancorp and newly formed Federal Savings Bank were defendents in a lawsuit filed by CitiMortgage claiming that details of some of the nearly 5,000 loans they purchased from the banks were misrepresented

Steven Mnuchin

Steven Mnuchin is also Trump's National Finance Co-Chairman. Interestingly (or perhaps "not surprisingly") Steven Mnuchin has been quite a prolific donor to Democrats in the past, including Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and John Kerry. With all those big name Democrat donations, his ties to George Soros probably aren't that suprising:

Wall Street Journal

Mnuchin himself started his career at Goldman Sachs. He worked there for 17 years, rising to become an executive vice president and chief information officer, leaving in late 2002 at the age of 39 with a reported $46 million stake in the bank. In 2003, Mnuchin left to join Eddie Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL, as a vice chairman. Mnuchin and Lampert had been college roommates at Yale, and they both joined Goldman Sachs after graduation in 1985.

He stayed only a matter of months before jumping to a George Soros-backed fund, SFM Capital Management, as CEO. With Soros’ $1 billion backing at SFM, Mnuchin lent money to companies in financial trouble.

International Business Times

Mnuchin is the chairman of OneWest Bank, which was formed out of the wreckage of failed IndyMac Bank in 2009 and seeded with about $1.5 billion from people like Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs exec, George Soros and computer tycoon Michael Dell.

And that arrangement certainly helped Mnuchin, Soros and other shareholders pull more than $2 billion in dividends out of the bank since its inception. That’s before the windfall on the sale to CIT where the original investors more than doubled their money. During that time, OneWest foreclosed on at least 35,000 homes in California. CIT also got a huge helping hand from the government during the crisis: It received $2.3 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and declared bankruptcy before paying it back.

OneWest Bank has come under heavy criticism for their foreclosure practices. Consumer advocacy group, California Reinvestment Coalition, requested an investigation into the company's tactics which allegedly include specifically targetting widow s, with foreclosures disproportionately concentrated in communities with higher percentages of minorities.

Fun Fact: Steven Mnuchin was an executive producer of Mad Max: Fury Road.


John Paulson

Billionaire John Paulson's father worked at Arthur Anderson and he attended Harvard Business. After getting his MBA in 1980, there were a series of stints at various firms including Bear Sterns and then in 1994, he started his own fund with a couple million and a single employee. Over the next decade, his fund did well, growing to control over a quarter billion in assets. Then, 27 years into his Wall Street career, Paulson skyrocketted out of relative obscurity in 2007 when he bet big against the subprime housing market via credit default swaps (CDS), making something like $4 billion dollars personally. He also set a record in 2010 when his hedge fund made over $5 billion. His fortunes have waned somewhat in recent years due to some losing investments in BoA and Citigroup but he's still worth about $10 billion. He's known for making money by essentially syphoning money out other player's mergers and aquisitions through what is described as "merger arbitrage." A big supporter of both Boehner and Romney, Paulson donated a million to Mitt Romney's Super PAC, Restore Our Future and hosted a private fundraiser at his NYC home for other rich folks looking to donate to Romney's campaign.



Stephen Feinberg

Billionaire Steve Feinberg is the co-founder of and CEO of Cerberus Capital Management. Cerebus is a private equity firm with more than $30 billion in assets in an impressive number of industries. Cerebus was part of the group that bought Chrysler in 2007, promising to turn it around. They of course didn't and took bailout money. Cerebus also bought a majority stake in GMAC in 2006 and again, took the bailout money.

Cerebus is the owner of Freedom Group, a holding company for gun manufacturers/brands Remington, Marlin, Bushmaster, DPMS and others. In 2012, citing Sandy Hook as a "watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level" it pledged to sell off all of the Freedom Group holdings. It has not done so (probably because the Dems posturing on guns is money, money, money).

Feinberg has DEEP ties to the GOP establishment.

Time

The founder of Cerberus Capital Management, Feinberg’s company manages more than $30 billion in investments and is headquartered in Manhattan. The firm has deep roots with Republicans. Former George H.W. Bush Vice President Dan Quayle is Cerberus’ head of global investment. John W. Snow, George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, is the firm’s chairman.

Harold Hamm

Billionaire Harold Hamm is worth in excess of $11 billion according to Forbes (down from a 2014 peak of nearly $19 billion). He's an entrepreneur with a an apparently legitimate rags to riches story. Multiple sources have Harold Hamm as Donald Trump's likely pick for Energy Secretary. He was named as Romney's energy advisor in March of 2012, shortly after which he dropped nearly a million dollars on Restore Our Future (the pro-Romney super PAC). As you may have already guessed by the "energy advisor" appointment, he's an oil man.

Hamm is the CEO of Continental Resources, an oil & gas exploration company notable for its large holdings in the Bakken formation, Niobara formation and others. In other words, he's a fracking mogul and in fact, a vertiable fracking pioneer. He got himself caught up in a wee little pay-for-play scandal of his own recently:

Bloomberg

Oil tycoon Harold Hamm told a University of Oklahoma dean last year that he wanted certain scientists there dismissed who were studying links between oil and gas activity and the state's nearly 400-fold increase in earthquakes, according to the dean's e-mail recounting the conversation.

Hamm, the billionaire founder and chief executive officer of Oklahoma City-based Continental Resources, is a major donor to the university, which is the home of the Oklahoma Geological Survey.

Yes folks, he tried to silence science in the name of profit by pressuring the university to which he is a major donor into firing scientists because he didn't like their research. Then he offered to sit on the university's search committee (what a guy, what a guy).



Howard Lorber

Howard Lorber is the President and CEO of Vector Group, LTD which along with major real estate holdings, owns a host of cheap cigarette brands under subsidaries Liggett Group LLC and Vector Tobacco Inc (Eve, Grand Prix, Pyramid, Eagle 20's, Ligget Select). Not sure what his net worth is but he's frequently listed as one of the highest paid CEOs in the country making a smidge over $36 million in 2012 and $42 million in 2015. Along with Donald, he's one of Carl Icahn's besties. Like Trump, photographed eating KFC on his plane, Lorber is a man who appreciates the constrast of fastfood and opulence, saying in March (follow that last link):

"When I bought my Rolls-Royce, the first thing I did was go to a McDonald's drive thru"

Ba-da-ba-ba-baaa...



Wilbur Ross, Jr

Billionaire Wilbur Ross (about $3 billion) is graduate of both Yale and Harvard. Notably, he owns an art collection worth in excess of $150 million. He served under Clinton on the board of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund, was Rudy Guiliani's privatization advisor and his ex-wife, Betsy McCaughey Ross, was Lt. Governor of NY, a campaign which cost him about $2.25 million. His specialty is leveraged buyouts. He's got holdings in everything from steel and textiles to foreign automotive companies and coal mines. Speaking of coal mines.

StateMaster

Following the Sago Mine disaster, the New York Post's Roddy Boyd reported that Ross "had been intimately involved with the company that owned the West Virginia mine where 12 miners perished — and he knew all about its safety problems, former executives charged." The article also reported that the mine had 12 roof collapses in 2005, and that the U.S. Department of Labor data showed 208 citations for safety violations in that same period, including 21 times for build-up of toxic gasses. Despite these figures, Ross refused to shut down the mine. [3] The Department of Labor and the State of West Virginia, as well as Congress are currently investigating the disaster.

...and for you NWO conspiracy theorists out there, for three years he also ran a private equity fund within Rothschild Investments.

Steven Roth

Billionaire Steven Roth is the largest real estate owner in New York City (about 10x the size of Trump's holdings by square feet) and he runs Vornado Reality Trust. He and Trump are co-owners of a 2.1 million square-foot office building located at 1290 Sixth Ave. There's an interesting story about how they came to co-own that building and how Stephen Roth "effectively rescued Trump from a most unpleasant situation" and the details are here. Vornado has also partnered withTrump's son-in-law Jared Kushner on various properties. Perhaps most notably, when he came to Kushner's rescue in 2012 when he nearly lost 666 Fifth Avenue (which cost a cool $1.8 billion in 2007). His wife, Daryl Roth, is a Broadway producer with 10 Tony awards. The couple bought Bernie Madoff's for Montauk beach house for $9.4 million. His company is currently building the most expensive dwelling in NYC history, a four-floor condo that it predicts will sell for about $250 million, twice the record for NYC's most expensive dwelling.



David Malpass

David Malpass has a long history with the GOP and with Wall Street. He was the Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagn and the Deputy Assistenat Secretary of State under Bush 41. He's servered in the past as GOP staff director for Congress’s Joint Economic Committee. He had a failed GOP primary run for the U.S. Senate (NY) in 2010. He also did a stint at Arthur Anderson. He currently operates research group Encima Global LLC which specializes in global economic and political trends and authors a column for Forbes oh he's on the board of multi-billion dollar private investment firm, New Mountain Capital.

What he's most notable for however is being the chief economist at Bear Sterns for 6 of the 15 years he was employed by the firm (hint: those years were at the end of Bear Sterns). In late 2007, he was one of those guys that was saying, "don't panic, it's fine bro" when of course, it obviously wasn't.

WSJ

The slowdown talk weighing on equities also reflects the Wall Street view that debt, mortgage and takeover businesses have replaced General Motors as the economy's bellwether. According to the bears: As goes the credit market, so goes the economy.

Fortunately, Main Street is not that fickle. Housing and debt markets are not that big a part of the U.S. economy, or of job creation. It's more likely the economy is sturdy and will grow solidly in coming months, and perhaps years.

But... he's not Hillary.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, but will likely be dismissed since most any high level financial criminal will have ties to one party or another.

Wonder who Hillary's advisers are? Wonder if their even American? We know Soros and a handful of islamic leaders have funded her. Wonder what IOU's are in place for the tens of millions payed to Hillary?

Lol, so it doesn't matter that he is going to surround him self with establishment cronies because Hillary, got it!.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Trump and his friends love the Establishment. The federal reserve and the corporate interests won't go anywhere under him.

originally posted by: sirlancelot
Wonder who Hillary's advisers are? Wonder if their even American? We know Soros and a handful of islamic leaders have funded her. Wonder what IOU's are in place for the tens of millions payed to Hillary?

Barely even one post in and the "but what about Hillary!" Posts are starting to pop up

originally posted by: muse7

originally posted by: sirlancelot
Wonder who Hillary's advisers are? Wonder if their even American? We know Soros and a handful of islamic leaders have funded her. Wonder what IOU's are in place for the tens of millions payed to Hillary?

Barely even one post in and the "but what about Hillary!" Posts are starting to pop up

Not only that, but they're completely off topic and address zero points in a very well written OP that has many links and a plethora of information to digest.

I'm no fan of Hillary but the buzzwords "Hillary," "Soros," and "Islamic," come into play in a thread solely about Trump... how expected.

And then those talk about how "waiting for those to 'correct the record,' to come along," when they themselves are doing just that for their own respective candidate.

Trump is no stranger to the establishment. Being anti-Trump does not automatically equate to being pro-Hillary. The world is not as black and white as this - and despite what many may say, some don't support Trump because of a many reasons - it has nothing to do with supporting another candidate or "buying the mainstream propaganda," that I've been told by others before.

That's a decently scary list. As I've said before my vote is with Stein, and for me to vote I need to be convinced the establishment is truly against him. So this is a big red flag for voting Trump for me.

That being said, does nothing to push me towards voting for Clinton, who I already know is a political mercenary that's bought and paid for.

That being said. They're on his economics team, and are pretty much business men like himself, and he's gotten quite the varied pool of them. As even you said not all of them were obviously anything to worry about. So we have to question if Donald who prides himself on being the king of the deal has them there to get a variety of economic ideas, or because they're all colluding together.

Now I'm a firm believer in the elite existing and working against the common man, for the most part, I'm not so deluded I don't believe exceptions don't exist. So colluding is not much of a stretch for me. I can buy it. Trumps the face and they're the people behind the face. Especially makes sense when some of them are worth more than Trump financially. They clearly don't need these jobs, so questioning why they are even willing to take these position is questionable as well.

So in that sense, you got me, my paranoia is in full swing.

But on the other hand, Trump and they are also theoretically competitors outside of the political office. Sure they agree on a great many things but they also disagree a lot. When they deal with each other they are on the same level, none are necessarily subservient to the other. None of them are reliant on each other to succeed. Which means they may be working together, but as Trump is an equal, they do so as advisors, in the end Trump weighs what they all have to say then decides for himself. There's still the question of why they all took the jobs. It's possible they did so because they depend on the economy, and would rather be able to at advise over letting Trump go without any guidance, or they just want to know what Trumps going to do so they can prepare themselves.

While I don't like it, it is still far superior to Hillary and here's why.

Hillary is not her own woman. Her entire existence is a servile one. She's dependent on what favors she can sell, her decisions and actions are decided by both foreign and domestic backers, entirely influenced by who pays her the most. Which pretty much falls to Soros. Unlike Donald who deals with Soros as a business associate, she relies on his donations for her wealth. Donald does not, he can choose to not make a deal with Soros if he doesn't like. Hillary cannot, if he tells her jump, she asks how high, because if she doesn't he stops backing her. Same is true for all her other donors. The only decisions Hillary really makes is if a bridge is worth burning or not and compare it to how her other donors might react if she does.

So in the end Hillary is just plain out, with Trump there's still the possibility he actually wants to go out with a legacy as a great president and no one controls his strings.

So yeah I'm still not convinced and I'm still for Stein, BUT Trump is still not necessarily as establishment as Hillary.

Whew that was long.

a reply to: Puppylove

No such thing as an anti-estab politcan, if there is, he is either lying like a beast or he isn't going to get very far.

a reply to: WanderingNomadd

I believe you. But I figure might as well try and at least vote for people showing disdain for the establishment, voting may not matter but trust me they know the real numbers. The more people that vote anti-establishent the bigger the F-U to them. It doesn't mean anything but an F-U but hey it makes me feel better and at least I can say I voted so you didn't vote people can shut up.

Also who knows, long shots do happen, people do crazy things. So going with people running on anti-establishment, if they win and are that long shot at least it plausible no matter how little. I'm still thinking 3rd party is the louder F-U than Trump, but I can be theoretically convinced Trump is.

They really really seem to want Hillary, I've never seen them so in the tank for a candidate like her before. So even if Trump is establishment, sounds like something about Hillary getting in gives them more of what they want. So anyone else getting in, at minimum slows them down and gives them a kick in the nuts.

a reply to: Puppylove

True True.

They really really seem to want Hillary, I've never seen them so in the tank for a candidate like her before.

I think that is as much a result of Hillarys massive corrupt influence and her powerful self interest loving friends as anything else. She wants to be president, even if trump was a shill and in bed with her completely she would try anything to beat him and claim the "honour" of being the first women preisdent.

All hail Hitlary...

Propaganda.

originally posted by: sirlancelot
Wonder who Hillary's advisers are? Wonder if their even American? We know Soros and a handful of islamic leaders have funded her. Wonder what IOU's are in place for the tens of millions payed to Hillary?

She hasn't announced a "Economic Advisory Council" but the blog Economists for Hillary has a list of some who have been publicly mentioned as economic advisors to Hillary Clinton:

Alan Krueger, Alan Blinder, Joseph Stiglitz, Simon Johnson, Aaron Chatterji and Heather Boushey.

The two campaigns are clearly taking different strategies in this regard as everyone that's been linked to her as an economic advisor is basically a big name economist and from that list, all but one are professors at Princeton, Duke, Columbia or MIT.

Trump went a different route.

That doesn't mean anything about who woud be Hillary's economic appointees if elected President and it likely wouldn't be those folks.

Krueger has had some big deal government appointments:

He was Chief Economist at the United States Department of Labor 1994-1995

and more recently in the Obama Administration:

Alan B. Krueger is the former Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Cabinet. Mr. Krueger was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on November 3, 2011. Previously, Mr. Krueger served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Alan Binder is the only one from this list who I know to be controversial.

DailyKos - Meet Alan Blinder, Hillary Clinton's economic advisor (and Wall St. One-Percenter)

[Promontory] allowed the high net-worth investor to go around the regulations limiting deposit insurance (at the time, $100,000) and benefit from coverage for near unlimited amounts. The investor would deposit funds in any amount and Prof. Blinder's company would break it up in smaller accounts and invest in banks, thus escaping the limit; it would look like a single account but would be insured in full. In other words, it would allow the super-rich to scam taxpayers by getting free government sponsored insurance. Yes, scam taxpayers. Legally. With the help of former civil servants who have an insider edge.

I can't invent a cast of sketchy or colorful characters. She went with economists, Trump went with mostly billionaire businessmen. There are a couple of prominent economists advising him:

Peter Navarro is an economics prof at UC Irvine.
Stephen Moore is an economist who used to write for and be on the editorial board of the WSJ and now he's at The Heritage Foundation.

For some reason they got last billing behind a big list of billionaires.

originally posted by: TheBulk
Propaganda.

Cool story bro!

Maybe you'd rather read my Big List of Trump and Clinton Connections?

My argument has never been that Hillary isn't a lying crony but rather that Donald Trump is just as bad or worse. He keeps proving me right and you keep ignoring the obvious.

originally posted by: muse7

originally posted by: sirlancelot
Wonder who Hillary's advisers are? Wonder if their even American? We know Soros and a handful of islamic leaders have funded her. Wonder what IOU's are in place for the tens of millions payed to Hillary?

Barely even one post in and the "but what about Hillary!" Posts are starting to pop up

Ya I know it's cliche but the same thing happens tenfold on Trump post. That being said Hillary doesn't have an advisory board does she? She already has too many iou's to be able to have smart people give her advice. Kinda of like Obama and how he doesn't listen to his generals. I'll take a businessman getting feedback from other successful businessmen over a crony hack getting advice from globalist and the likes of soros and his assorted lot of crooks!

a reply to: sirlancelot

Hillary won't be getting advice she'll be getting orders. Get it right dammit.

a reply to: theantediluvian

It must be propaganda if its against your candidate. The only other option is to accept your faith is misplaced.

Great thread, alot of research asual.