Lloyd Blankfein on Gary Cohn: ‘No one’s perfect’

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein gave a less-than full-throated endorsement when asked on Wednesday whether Gary Cohn would make a good chairman of the Federal Reserve.

“No one’s perfect, but he’s the best I know,” Blankfein said of Cohn, his former No. 2 at Goldman Sachs, during a talk with journalists on Wednesday at the bank’s headquarters in New York.

“He’d be a different kind of person” than Fed Chair Yellen, Blankfein added. “He’s not an academic. I don’t know that he reads a lot of policy papers, let alone write them.”

Blankfein’s lukewarm comments came weeks after Trump himself floated Cohn, who is currently director of the National Economic Council, for the role atop the US central bank in an interview with the Wall Street Journal (paywall).

It’s unclear if Cohn will ever get the job, however. Trump has reportedly cooled on the ex-Goldman banker after Cohn criticized the President’s response to white supremacists gathering in Charlottesville, Va. last month. Still, Trump has wavered before installing advisers in top job before, as in the case of ex-communications manager Anthony Scaramucci.

The top job at the Fed is set to open up in late January when Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s term expires.

On the positive side, Blankfein said “Gary is very, very capable,” and that “there is nobody who has a better sense of markets, or the consequence that decisions will have, on people’s behavior who act and are guided by market forces.”

In a half-hour gab session with journalists from the German business magazine Handelsblatt, Blankfein also landed a few thinly veiled jabs at President Trump, saying, “there is a line in which populism can cross over into demagoguery.”

“Demagoguery is the crossover where populism becomes a bad thing, and people make things up, and they assign responsibilities that aren’t fair and justified, and scapegoat communities,” Blankfein said. “And then it becomes a very bad thing.”

Blankfein emphasized he was not “predicting” the US would fall into that situation — but added that he also didn’t think it was too far-fetched, either.

“I‘d say if you wanted to forestall bad events, the best thing to do is anticipate them and try to correct them before they get close,” he said.

This likely won’t be the last time that Blankfein criticizes the White House. This time, he insisted he was doing it on behalf of his employees.

“As CEO of a big company, I have to be a kind of a champion of the interests of our people as insofar as their ability to do their job, to feel comfortable in their work environment, and to be able to fulfill their ambitions.”

Blankfein has taken to trolling the president on Twitter in recent months, blasting his policies on immigration, the environment, and Trump’s “equivalency” after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, N.C., that left one counter-protester dead.