When Donald Trump won the race for the White House last year, markets rallied. The so-called “Trump trade” rested on the hope that the US president would deliver business friendly reforms that would boost growth. This was a bit of a misnomer: what executives and investors have really been betting on for most of this year is a “Cohn trade”.
After all, it is now clear that the president has limited ability to focus on the grubby details of economic reform. It is also evident that business issues sit below economic nationalism on the agenda for the likes of Steve Bannon, White House adviser. Just look at Mr Bannon’s comments to The American Prospect magazine this week, in which he argues that America is locked in a zero-sum contest with China.
Yet even as Mr Trump’s behaviour becomes more capricious, executives have continued to hope — or pray — that Gary Cohn, head of the National Economic Council, would support them. To be sure, the former Goldman Sachs president never displayed any interest in public policy or economic theory before arriving in the White House. His Wall Street rivals tend to view him as an opportunist who plays hard. But Mr Cohn is smart, knows how to execute plans and understands free market incentives; or so went the chatter in the upper echelons of Wall Street.