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Gary Cohn speaks at an event organized by the Economics Club of Washington D.C.
By Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images.
For months after leaving the White House in the middle of a tiff with Donald Trump this spring, Gary Cohn seemed to be drifting. While the former Goldman Sachs ruler wandered between his Upper East Side apartment and his home in the Hamptons, his future seemed just as gloomy. "It's hard to be in the middle of everything, in the most important office in the world and to have nothing to do," said one who knows Cohn well to my colleague. William D. Cohan. "He'll want to be back in the mix." A job on Wall Street seemed to be a stretch, but rumor ran that Cohn was considering starting his own private equity firm or becoming the C.E.O. of a technology company. It was even, according to Anthony Scaramucci, considering "crypto".
Several months later, it seems that the Mooch was on the money. Although Cohn is apparently still in the limbo of employment, on Friday Financial Times announced that the former national economic adviser to the president would join the advisory board of Spring Labs, a young company developing a blockchain technology designed to help lenders verify the identity of customers. Working with the company was a "unique opportunity" and "a clear place to take a very analog industry and digitize," said Cohn at the Financial Times. (In August, Cohn told Bloomberg that even though he spent two-thirds of his time playing golf, he had also made calls about an investment "in the crypto world". It is assumed that Spring Labs was the company it was referring to.
Cohn is not the only Wall Street dinosaur to go digital. After struggling against this effort for months, Wall Street seems to have entered into a precarious truce with the blockchain. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, who has already called the cryptocurrency "fraud" that would "not finish well" and would "kill" someone, announced this summer that his company was testing [blockchain] and will use it for a lot of things. Others have been more reluctant to support digital resources. Before leaving his post of C.E.O. perch at Goldman earlier this month, Lloyd Blankfein Bitcoin has been described as a fraudulent vehicle – a confusing statement given that shortly after, the company announced its intention to build a crypto-trading desk. A few months later, the firm got a total of 180, which would have paused in his projects.
But going wholesale from Wall Street to Blockchain, even if there is a stopover in the swamp, is not unknown. Goldman Sachs alum Matthew Goetz launched a cryptocurrency hedge fund called BlockTower Capital, and former head of J.P.Morgan Global Commodities Blythe Masters currently runs a blockchain company, Digital Asset Holdings LLC. Moreover, instead of focusing solely on crypto-currencies, Spring Labs relies on technology, making Cohn's decision a little less absurd than working directly with another motto like dogecoin. The disadvantage is of course that cryptography is as volatile as ever: Thursday, the world market lost $ 6 billion. The timing of Cohn leaves something to be desired. But if his stay at the White House is an indication, he is more than willing to bear reputational damage.
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