Systemic Financial Risk at the Heart of Trump Mark II

The incoming US president is picking nominees with vested interests to be in charge of key regulatory areas.

- Patrick Jenkins

The key nominations to US President-elect Donald Trump's top team are in some ways like those of many presidents before him - overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly rich and significantly drawn from the financial services industry.

And yet, Trump's nominees differ in one important respect. They are not mainstream. In particular, the list contains no prominent bankers, breaking the tradition (even upheld by Trump Mark I) that financier appointments would normally be drawn from the likes of Goldman Sachs.

This is true across the board from US Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist, and Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager, to the incoming US ambassador to Britain, self-made investment banker Warren Stephens, and new US ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, who is a private equity and property investor.

Most of Trump's financier appointees have been significant donors to his campaign and/or business partners during his career as a property mogul.

The "spoils system" of patronage in US politics - an 18th-century tradition that allowed presidents to bolster loyalty by appointing friends and family to government roles - was supposed to have been done away with by a succession of legislative reforms begun in the late 19th century.