Trump Assembles Crack Team Of Random White Dudes Named Steve To Advise Him On Economics

Donald Trump has announced the people who are going to be advising him on the economics, even though he totally knows all the economics already himself from having run such a successful business lo these many years. AND SURPRISE! They are all white dudes!

Also six of them are named Steve! And only two of them are actual economists! Which is actually not surprising given that pretty much every economist on earth, including Ben Stein who is endorsing him (and who, you need to know, once wrote a book called LUDES   and I own a copy ). Probably there are not a lot of economists who want to jump on the Trump train.

Outside of Stephen Moore, the chief economist of the Heritage Foundation of all places, and Dr. Peter Navarro, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and teaches economics at Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Trump's team is made up of a bunch of Wall Street bros (which is SO WEIRD because we thought Wall St. had bought and paid for Hillary Clinton!), and real estate dudes. Mostly named Steve.

Tom Barrack- Real estate bro, founded Rebuild America Now , a pro-Trump super PAC

Andy Beal- Billionaire investor dude who profited off the 2008 recession by buying up undervalued properties.

Stephen M. Calk- Banker dude, whose company had a habit of underwriting mortgages with less than factual information, and is pretty sure bank regulation is unnecessary.

Dan DiMicco- Former Executive Chairman of the Nucor Corporation, a steel company.

Steven Feinberg- Wall Street dude AND a real estate dude, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cerberus Capital Management , L.P. FUN FACT: the chairman of this company is none other than former Vice-President Dan Quayle .

Dan Kowalski- former Deputy Staff Director of the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee

Howard M. Lorber- Real estate bro, President and CEO of Vector Group Ltd.

David Malpass- Held positions in both the Reagan and Dubya administrations, "founded Encima Global, a consulting and research firm that provides insight and analysis on global economic and political trends."

Steven Mnuchin- Hedge fund bro, currently serving as Finance Chairman for Donald J. Trump for President.

Steven Roth- investor dude, CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, which co-owns two buildings with Trump.

One of the white dudes on this team not named Steve is a fella named John Paulson! He is a hedge fund guy who made BILLIONS of dollars betting (and hoping!) that people would lose their houses! A practice which -- as you probably know -- was a pretty big contributing factor to the great subprime mortgage crisis. Yeah! Because that's the Make America Great way -- profiting off the pain of others, and hoping that your fellow Americans lose so that you can make lots and lots of money.

See, Paulson had a buddy, "Fab Fabrice" Tourre, this Goldman Sachs guy who created a mortgage security called Abacus 2007-AC1, which bundled toxic sub-prime mortgages. He sold this to people, while simultaneously making short bets against it, and encouraging Paulson to do the same! Then they both got SUPER rich and a lot of people lost everything!

The SEC had accused Tourre of misleading institutional investors about subprime mortgage securities that he knew were doomed to fail, setting the stage for a valued Goldman hedge fund client, Paulson & Co. Inc., to secretly bet against the investment.

The maneuver ended up making $1 billion for the hedge fund and its wealthy president,John A. Paulson, and millions of dollars in fees for Goldman. The SEC also sought to show that it helped earn Tourre a bonus that boosted his salary to $1.7 million in 2007.

On the witness stand, the SEC lawyers confronted Tourre with a January 2007 email it said deliberately misled another institutional investor about Paulson's short position in the investment called Abacus 2007-AC1.

Yes, who better to advise Trump on economic matters for the betterment of our country than a guy whose wealth comes not from investing in Americans, or creating jobs for Americans, or doing literally anything for anyone, but in fact comes entirely from betting Americans won't be able to pay their mortgage, and then profiting when they can't! Make America Great Again indeed !

[ Fortune | Donald Trump | Omaha | ThinkProgress ]