Wall Street
Gina Raimondo came from private equity, and she’s stayed close to her Wall Street friends. She lets big banks hijack her multibillion-dollar government grant programs, and gives them an open door to influence her and her staff.
Wall Street’s happy with Raimondo — and they lobby her to make sure they stay that way.
As far as Wall Street is concerned, if they must accept a Democratic Secretary of Commerce, Raimondo is the best kind. Her background is in venture capital and private equity — including at an investment firm backed by giant private equity firm Bain Capital — and she speaks the language of Wall Street. You can tell by the amount of attention she lavishes on them.
It’s not entirely clear why; Commerce doesn’t set financial policy or regulate the markets. But for whatever reason, the capitalist fat cats are in her office every week, telling her what they want her to do. She’s taken hundreds of meetings with Wall Street executives, including the CEOs or chairs of dozens of financial firms like BlackRock, Carlyle, JPMorgan, and Bank of America.
It certainly appears that when multimillionaire and billionaire finance CEOs give Raimondo instructions, she listens. They think so, anyway; they’re effusive in their praise. “Secretary Raimondo has a passion for achieving results,” said Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon (who makes $31 million a year in cash and stock compensation, and whose executives lobbied her four times in 18 months).
From an activist policy perspective, praise from people like this isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement; finance CEOs generally aren’t fans of strong government regulation. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, net worth $2.2 billion, is publicly sour on the Biden administration’s aggressive stewardship of the economy, and recently said Donald Trump was “kind of right” about economics, if that tells you anything about the kind of people we’re dealing with. When someone like Solomon talks about “results” for financial firms, he certainly doesn’t mean the kinds of things Joe Biden has made a priority, like student loan forgiveness, caps on overdraft fees, or big-ticket antitrust and consumer fraud lawsuits.
Source: David Omer
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Gina Raimondo is corporate America's best friend in the White House.
- Adam Wren, national political correspondent
Raimondo handed over $100 billion of your money to Wall Street executives.
When Congress enacted the CHIPS Act to supercharge the American semiconductor chip industry and make it more competitive with China’s, it made over $100 billion in subsidies and loans available to American companies. But who would get the money?
Gina Raimondo tasked her Wall Street friends with the problem. She built a team of former Wall Street executives — like former Goldman Sachs partners Kevin Quinn and Brad Koenig and managing director Srujan Linga, Blackstone veteran Farha Faisal, McKinsey partner Sara O’Rourke, and former KKR executive Todd Fisher — to decide where the money would go.
Industry critics say that these friends of Raimondo’s have no experience in the chip industry, leaving them at a disadvantage in negotiations. (Fisher’s background is in real estate investment.) And big chip companies like Intel are already putting political pressure on the Commerce Department to gain friendly terms. All of this is tying the program up in bureaucracy, and as of the end of 2023, the Commerce Department had given out only a tiny fraction of the grant money Congress funded.
The early results seem to show that when you empower wealthy Wall Street patrons to distribute public funds, the money goes exactly where you think: into the pockets of the biggest corporations, with the tightest connections to the power brokers holding the purse strings and the loudest lobbying voices. Congress enacted a funding program with the public interest in mind, and Wall Street and their friends ran off with the money. That’s about par for the course when Gina Raimondo is in charge.
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[The staffing of this team] raises questions about the abuse of the revolving door between government service and the private sector.
Access sets the agenda, and the big money buys access.
The Department of Commerce has no formal policy role in the financial industry. But America’s financial barons are determined to leverage their wealth into control of the federal regulatory apparatus, and Gina Raimondo’s calendar shows they have unparalleled access to her and her team.
CEOs, presidents, board chairs, directors, and other top leaders of financial companies like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, BlackRock, Blackstone, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Warburg Pincus, and Bloomberg LP walk right into her office whenever they like. Climatologists, on the other hand, can’t get a meeting, even though she runs NOAA and the National Weather Service. More on that here.
Here are the Wall Street banks on Gina Raimondo’s calendar:
| 2021 | Q1 | Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Carlyle Group, Paypal, JPMorgan, Bank of America |
| Q2 | Saban Capital, TPG Rise Climate Fund, Mastercard, JPMorgan, American Express, Payments Leadership Council, Warburg Pincus, Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg LP | |
| Q3 | Blackstone, Mastercard, BlackRock, Carlyle Group, TPG Rise Climate Fund, Financial Services Forum | |
| Q4 | Carlyle Group, Bridgewater Associates, BlackRock, PayPal, Warburg Pincus, Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg LP | |
| 2022 | Q1 | BlackRock, Bank of America, Lazard, Blackstone, Centerbridge Partners, Rock Creek Global Advisors, JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg LP, Bank of America, Providence Equity, Morgan Stanley |
| Q2 | Cerberus Capital Management, Mastercard, Goldman Sachs, Citadel, BlackRock, Blackstone, UBS, Bank of America, Baupost Group, Bank Policy Institute, State Street | |
| Q3 | Jefferson River Capital, KKR, Fidelity, Greylock, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, PayPal, Mastercard, Bloomberg LP, Bain Capital, Bridgewater, Bank of America | |
| Q4 | BlackRock, Carlyle Group, Barclays, Rock Creek Global Advisors, Bloomberg LP, Fidelity, Greylock, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Jefferson River Capital, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Blackstone | |
| 2023 | Q1 | Blackstone, BlackRock, Valor Capital, Greylock, Blackstone, BlackRock, Valor Capital, JPMorgan Chase, Lazard, Tull Investment, Goldman Sachs, Greylock, Town Hall Ventures |
| Q2 | Goldman Sachs, Greylock, Citigroup, BlackRock, Visa, Bloomberg LP, JPMorgan Chase | |
| Q3 | Schmidt Futures, Allen & Co., Greylock, Lafayette Square, Citigroup, Bain Capital, Jefferson River Capital, Fidelity Investments, BlackRock, Mastercard, Visa, Primavera Capital, JPMorgan Chase, Carlyle Group, Bain Capital, State Street | |
| Q4 | Mastercard, Blackstone, Japan Bank, Bain Capital, Bloomberg LP, Visa, Greylock, TPG Capital, Vista Equities, Softbank, Visa | |
| 2024 | Q1 | Greylock, O’Leary Ventures, BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, Paypal, Softbank |
None of this is new.
As Rhode Island governor, Raimondo was closely entangled with private equity and venture capital interests that made big money in fossil fuels. She took hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from New York bankers at Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley — including illegal gifts she was forced to return — and when a controversial group of Morgan Stanley bankers founded an investment firm called I Squared Capital, she invited them into her circle. I Squared founder Adil Rahmathulla served on the Rhode Island State Investment Commission — which put state money into something called the ISQ Global Infrastructure Fund, which was managed by I Squared. (Having trouble following? This kind of tangled web is a typical shadowy Wall Street arrangement.)
She brought her I Squared relationships with her to Commerce, too. I Squared invested in controversial fossil fuel projects in the U.S. and Latin America, and I Squared Chief Investment Officer Sadek Wahba invited her to make a speech at an event at the Wilson Center, which was disrupted by climate activists (who said “she bolted the stage like a bunny” — and there’svideo). People with I Squared connections still serve on government committees (Kristina Johnson) and sit alongside her on nonprofit boards (Ginger Lew).
And her husband Andy Moffit, a senior McKinsey corporate consultant, has been cozy with Wall Street, too. McKinsey has made billions of dollars advising companies at the very top of the financial sector for more than four decades. (Those companies don’t always get what they pay for. The troubled Silicon Valley Bank hired McKinsey to advise it on how to assess risk, but in its comprehensive report on the causes of the bank’s failure, the Federal Reserve found that it “failed” in its responsibilities.)
Remember: these are Gina Raimondo’s friends. She built her career in private equity, and lives in their world. She understands their concerns — a bit too well — and is in a position to tilt trade and economic policy in their favor.
Learn more about Gina Raimondo’s harmful partnerships
Big Tech
Over and over, Raimondo and her staff take meetings with CEOs and execs at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — and push for the policies they ask for — even as the rest of the government is investigating them for squashing small businesses, invading your privacy, and endangering your kids.
Learn more about Raimondo's connections to Big Tech.
Special interests: Big Pharma, defense giants, and more
Raimondo is “corporate America’s best friend in the White House,” one observer says. Climate scientists and union leaders can’t get in to see her, but she’s met more than a thousand times with CEOs, top executives, and industry trade groups. In just 7 months, she huddled with over 200 big-company execs — that’s more than one meeting per day.
Learn more about Raimondo's connections to special interests.
