Bill and Hillary Clinton have had a two-decade-long relationship with big-banker Goldman Sachs that grew tighter after the 2008 financial crash for which the powerful Wall Street firm was widely criticized for helping create, The New York Times reports.
According to the Times, Goldman has provided the Clintons with some of their most influential advisers, millions of dollars in campaign contributions and speaking fees, and financial support for the family foundation’s charitable programs for 20-plus years.
In the years between the end of the financial crisis and the start of Clinton’s second White House bid, the Clintons "viewed Wall Street's elite as friends and collaborators even as the public viewed them with suspicion and scorn," the Times writes.
During that time, the Times reports, Hillary Clinton also earned $675,000 to deliver three speeches at Goldman events.
"Wall Street now conjures up images of corruption, and if you are a person from Wall Street, you have to overcome that," Roy Smith, a former Goldman Sachs partner who teaches finance at New York University, tells the Times.
"One of the big rubs against Hillary now is that she was paid by Goldman to give speeches at Goldman."
The Times chronicles Goldman's links to the Clintons dating to the 1990s, when Robert Rubin, the company’s co-senior partner, left to join President Bill Clinton’s economic policy team.
"In the early '90s, support from the business community and the financial sector was seen as an important credential for Democrats looking to shed the anti-business label that Republicans had been hanging around their necks," Howard Wolfson, a top strategist for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, tells the Times.
The Clintons' relationships with Wall Street deepened in the 2000s, the Times reports.
During her years in Congress, employees of Goldman donated in excess of $234,000 to Hillary Clinton, more than those of any other company except Citigroup the Times reports, citing the Center for Responsive Politics.
And when the 2008 crash hit, Bill Clinton bucked the tide of venom aimed at Goldman, saying derivatives trading needed better oversight, but that he was skeptical of the commission’s charges aimed at Goldman.
But when Hillary Clinton began running in the 2016 White House race, she defended the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul and called for even broader regulation of Wall Street.
The financial crisis "basically ended the debate within the Democratic Party," Austan Goolsbee, a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, told the Times.
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