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Top economic adviser Gary Cohn is only the latest Goldman figure to head for the White House exits, suggesting the influence of the oh-so-establishment banking powerhouse has been overwhelmed by the more nationalistic voices in the West Wing.

Of course, handing big jobs to Goldman alumni is an Oval Office tradition. The influential bank has produced Treasury secretaries, White House chiefs of staff and top economic advisers in both Republican and Democratic administrations. But Trump's reliance on Goldman talent was a surprise to some, given his anti-Wall Street, drain-the-swamp campaign rhetoric.

"I think Donald Trump wanted these Goldman people as a way to stroke his own ego. Don't forget that Goldman never wanted to do business with Donald Trump," Cohan said. "It was a way for (Trump) to say 'Ha, ha, now I've got some of your best people working for me.'"

The recently publicized tensions on college campuses, particularly those in the heavily scrutinized Ivy League, are among many forces at play for students today. But there’s another that has not yet captivated the news cycle.

It’s called pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures

This pressure is hardly exclusive to Ivy League students. In the 2022-23 academic year, 112,270 students majored in computer science, more than double the number nine years earlier.

The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior. The firms may not be intent on evil; they aren't intent on anything except short-term profits: they're insensible.

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.

If Goldman Sachs is going to change, it will be only if change is imposed upon it from the outside—either by the market's decision that it is no longer viable in its current form or by the government's decision that we can no longer afford it.

As a COVID-19 summer surge sweeps the country, deep cleans are all the rage.

To some American companies and Florida men, COVID-19 is apparently a war that will be won through antimicrobial blasting, to ensure that pathogens are banished from every square inch of America’s surface area.

COVID-19 has reawakened America’s spirit of misdirected anxiety, inspiring businesses and families to obsess over risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed. This is hygiene theater.

On a muggy morning in July 2008, hundreds of customers stood outside IndyMac Bank branches in Southern California, trying to pull their savings from the lender, which was doomed by losses on risky mortgages.

Steven Mnuchin didn’t know much about IndyMac as he watched the scenes on CNBC from his Midtown Manhattan office. But he immediately saw an opportunity and began figuring out how to buy the bank.

Regulators seized IndyMac, foreshadowing a vicious banking crisis. Six months later, Mr. Mnuchin and his investment partners acquired IndyMac with a helping hand from the U.S. government. The deal eventually earned him hundreds of millions of dollars in personal profits.

Harvard, where, at a wood-paneled dining hall last year, two juniors explained how to assess a fellow undergraduate’s earning potential. It’s easy, they said, as we ate mussels, beets and sautéed chard: You can tell by who’s getting a bulge bracket internship.

A bulge bracket bank, like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or Citi. The biggest, most prestigious global investment banks

Not to be confused with M.B.B., which stands for three of the most prestigious management consulting firms: McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.

Fast forward a decade: The philosophy, sketched out privately at the Boston office of Brown Rudnick,is now at the center of an intense struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

This is more than a grudge match. At stake for the Democratic Party is the support of middle-class, swing voters who decide elections.

Many on the left were shocked, and angered. Warren’s allies saw Third Way as a proxy — being used by her enemies on Wall Street to scare off the rest of the party.

Money managers are wondering whether soft earnings will justify more stock gains, given the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s 26.5% rise last year. That helps explain why the Dow is down 118 points to start the year.

hey are far from most extremes of 2000, however. So while many investors are turning cautious, few are pulling back wholesale.

Goldman SachsGS +0.63% investment strategist David Kostin startled investors a week ago by warning that prices are high compared to analysts’ forecasts. The chances are two out of three that the S&P will fall at least 10% sometime this year, before finishing with an overall yearly gain of around 3%, he said.

The ability of people like Mr. Lefevre to create anonymous Twitter accounts underscores concerns about the veracity of what is published and the identity of authors. It also raises questions about whether publishers are blurring the line between real life and the made-up kind.

At the time, an account called @CondeElevator had sprung up, supposedly chronicling the goings-on in the elevator of the media company Condé Nast. “I thought, ‘This is ridiculous that people are infatuated with Condé Nast. If they only saw the elitist, sexist and out-of-touch things bankers say.’ People had no idea what it is really like.”

He said his intent was neither to mock nor glamorize Wall Street. “I do not have an agenda to paint the people or this culture one way or the other,” he said, adding that he was “always a cynical banker” when he worked on Wall Street but “I loved it. We did a lot of crazy stuff. It’s not like I had a great epiphany along the way.

While Ms. Howerton and her supporters report Twitter accounts for abuse, she is also asking YouTube to take down the video commentary that makes use of her video and other family images. She has filed a privacy complaint, which YouTube rejected, and is waiting for it to respond to her new complaint, alleging copyright violation. Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University and author of “Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age,” said he thinks Ms. Howerton’s belief that she can regain control of the footage may be overly optimistic.

“The use of home video and family images for political debate is something that has real consequences,” he said. “She has made her life choices, her experiences, her children’ experiences, a matter for public debate. When people do this they do expose themselves to criticism and attacks and some of them are quite unpleasant.”

Eric Goldman, a professor of law and director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law, agreed that because Ms. Howerton herself used family video as part of a political discussion, she may have little legal recourse when that video is used as part of a larger video engaged in social commentary on the same topic. In many situations, videos or pictures posted online can become “fair game” for critics to use in online attacks against the poster’s position or for other undesirable political or social statements, Mr. Goldman said in an email.

Thursday night, Donald Trump stepped off a stage at the North Charleston Coliseum, in South Carolina,

Chances are we will be seeing more of them

Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, who took their shots at the billionaire from New York, the other candidates seemed to have given up any hope of standing up to him.

With two weeks left before voters in Iowa cast the very first votes in the 2016 presidential election, Republican front-runner Donald Trump is turning up the heat on his fiercest rival in the Hawkeye State -– Sen. Ted Cruz.

On the campaign trail, Trump is now questioning the freshmen Texas senator for a loan, first reported by The New York Times, that Cruz took out from Goldman Sachs during his 2012 Senate run that he failed to disclose in federal campaign finance documents.

Stephanopoulos told Trump that some legal scholars have suggested Trump himself would have standing to sue Cruz. "Oh, that's an interesting case. Wow, that sounds like a very good case. I'd do the public a big favor," Trump responded, but he would not say whether he'd actually file such a suit. "It's a good idea-- maybe I'll talk to them about it. I'd like to talk to Ted about it, see how he'd feel about it. 'Cause you know, when I file suits, I file real suits."

There are two ways for the federal government to address income inequality. One is to redistribute more money to people at the bottom of the income ladder. The other is to use the tools of fiscal and monetary policy to drive unemployment low enough to drive up demand and wages for those workers.

Mr. Biden proposed raising the child tax credit 50% to $3,000 or more for the year and making it refundable, meaning families who owe less tax than the credit would get a check for the difference. He would extend and boost enhanced weekly unemployment insurance benefits by $100 from the $300 in December’s stimulus package to $400. He would extend a 15% increase in food stamps through the summer, raise the maximum earned-income tax credit for childless adults by nearly $1,000 and extend it to more people.

Those steps, plus adding $1,400 to the $600-per-adult checks approved in December, would slash the poverty rate from 12.6% to 9%, or by more than 11 million people, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. The number of children in poverty would drop by half, or 5 million.

More than 150 senior executives from some of the largest American companies across several major industries have lined up behind President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

The group of executives includes the top executives representing some of the powerful business interests in the US, ranging from bank and investment firms like Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, to technology companies like Google, Intel and IBM, to hospitality companies like Loews Hotels & Co. and airlines including American and United Airlines. Top executives from real estate, insurance and utility firms also signed on to the letter.

"Congress should act swiftly and on a bipartisan basis to authorize a stimulus and relief package along the lines of the Biden-Harris administration's proposed American Rescue Plan."

In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year.

The book was about how women can make it to the top. It was a sort of “work-life balance” category buster, because she was telling women to pretty much forget about the “life” part.

when I looked through the galley, the whole thing was so manufactured and B-school-ish that I just wanted to put my head on the keyboard and have a little nap.

Unlike routine tests for diabetes or high cholesterol, however, the BRCA gene evaluation — performed by only one company in the United States, Myriad Genetics — is phenomenally expensive, with a “list price” close to $4,000

if this is the model for the future — when testing for genetic markers is certain to become a far greater part of health care than it is now — we’re all in trouble.

Without competition, Myriad can effectively charge whatever it wants. Later this year, the company said it would begin incorporating the BRCA test into a 25-gene cancer-risk evaluation and phase out the à la carte BRCA test by 2015. For that broader test, it projects a gross profit margin of 87 percent.

Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse.

Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.

First, they have cried wolf too many times. They’ve spent three years warning of imminent crisi

, the reaction of the vast majority of Republicans is to hide or spin for Trump

He’s not going to get involved in specifics anyway

He’s not president yet.

so far his economic policies are all about empowering ethically challenged businesses to cheat and exploit the little guy.

In particular, he and his allies in Congress are making it a priority to unravel financial reform — and specifically the parts of financial reform that protect consumers against predators.

Last week Mr. Trump released a memorandum calling on the Department of Labor to reconsider its new “fiduciary rule,” which requires financial advisers to act in their clients’ best interests