Canadians excited to have former Goldman Sachs banker as new Prime Minister

We’re in the big leagues now! We finally have our own GS alum in the top job, just like they had Rishi Sunak in Britain, Italy had Mario Draghi, and Australia had Malcom Turnbull. Off the top of my head, I don’t recall any of their governments celebrated for improving the lot of their people. Trump packed his first cabinet with GS alumni. His shadow boss Steve Bannon is former GS. There are literally scores of them at the top of the banking and insurance industry in the US and EU. Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right AfD in Germany is a GS grad. They generally skew right politically, although they were plentiful in recent Dem administrations (not that I’d consider that skewing left!). There’s less of a GS presence in the Trump 2.0 cabinet. That’s too bad, otherwise Carney could have sorted out this tariff fracas with a phone call. The billionaires Trump’s hired on from Cantor Fitzgerald and Morgan Stanley are probably just as sympathetic to the interests of the common people as the GS folks. After retiring from the BoE gig Carney was handed not one, but two lucrative sinecures, at Bloomberg and at Brookfield. I’m willing to wager he’s got more billionaires on speed-dial than Chrystia, but probably not as many Ukrainian ones. It was a little unnerving to witness the raucous applause he got from the Liberal faithful at the convention. They’re obviously expecting great things. I am too. Not so much for the folks lining up at the food banks, but certainly for the kind of people he’s spent his entire professional career serving.