Oren Cass is kind of the intellectual godfather of Trump’s tariff scheme. Cass would like to see it morph into a more permanent and predictable system, of course, but he still believes it will lead to an American manufacturing renaissance even in the absence of supporting evidence. He is also taking a victory lap on inflation even though it remains stubbornly high.
But Cass isn’t on Team Trump when it comes to bank deregulation. In a column in the NYT, he longs for the days when bankers actually made loans to create new and expanded businesses instead of facilitating share buybacks and destructive mergers. He does everything except call bankers vampire squid. There is little in the column with which Bernie Sanders would disagree.
Trump has made freeing bankers from the chains forged during the Great Recession one of the pillars of his program. Don’t expect Scott Bessent to be calling Cass for advice anytime soon.