Are Trump and his cronies manipulating the markets for their own profit? William Cohan lays out the evidence

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Wednesday Talk Radio

Air date:

Wed, 01/29/2020 - 8:00am to 9:00am

Author of "Why Wall Street Matters," "Money and Power," and "House of Cards" has more recently been writing about how Trump and his circle may have been manipulating the stock market based on actions he has taken as President

While impeachment occupies the centers of political power, Trump's mercenary approach to the Presidency continues unabated. He now appears to have gone beyond just profitting from the use of his personal properties, "brand" and other forms of influence. In an explosive, though widely ignored by the mainstream media, series of articles for Vanity Fair, William Cohan details what he calls the "Trump Chaos Trades," a series of massively profitable trades on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that preceded major actions by Trump. As Cohan says in the sub-head to the first article, "The president's talk can move markets--and it's made some futures traders billions. Did they know what he was going to say before he said it?"

William D. Cohan, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the New York Times bestselling author of three non-fiction narratives about Wall Street: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World; House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street; and, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His book, The Price of Silence, about the Duke lacrosse scandal was published in April 2014 and was also a New York Times bestseller. His new book, Why Wall Street Matters, was published by Random House in February 2017. He is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and a columnist for the DealBook section of the New York Times. He also writes for The Financial Times, The New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, The Nation, Fortune, and Politico. He previously wrote a bi-weekly opinion column for The New York Times and an opinion column for BloombergView. He also appears regularly on CNN, on Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor, on MSNBC and the BBC-TV. He has also appeared three times as a guest on the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, and CBS This Morning as well as on numerous NPR, BBC and Bloomberg radio programs.

Cohan started out as an investigative reporter for the Raleigh Times. before going on to work on Wall Street for seventeen years as a mergers and acquisitions banker. In 2019, Cohan alleged the possibility that US president Donald Trump or someone close to him had used advance knowledge of political developments to profit from insider trading, publicized in two articles for Vanity Fair titled "'Who Knew Trump Would Offer a Truce With Xi?': The Mystery of the Wall Street Trump Trades" and "'There Is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On': The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the Trump Chaos Trades".^[3]^[4]^[5]. Cohan's second article caused congressional representatives Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice to call for a federal investigation, but several experts interviewed by Bloomberg questioned the evidence, while Cohan stood by the article but distanced himself from the implied conclusion ("I don’t make any allegations, I don’t know what really happened").^[6] Writing in Slate, Felix Salmon called Cohan's articles "bullshit", arguing that he had no evidence that the trades in question were unusual, or that they had yielded the alleged profits, or that insider knowledge had been involved at all.^[5] Further, Terry Duffy, the CEO of CME Group Inc, the company that operates the exchange where the futures trade, questioned Cohan's understanding of the data, "[Cohan] mistakenly summed up all volume for those derivatives during spans of time and implausibly attributed that buying and selling, spread across thousands of transactions, to a single bad actor or group of cheaters." ^[7]