Ted Cruz’s Goldman Sachs Problem
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It was also well known in political circles that Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is an investment banker and a longtime employee of Goldman Sachs, a firm that has come to symbolize—fairly or unfairly—the power and influence of Wall Street. According to a March, 2015, article in USA Today, Heidi Cruz joined Goldman in 2005 and ran its Houston wealth-management unit, which, the report said, “handles portfolios for clients with an average net worth of $40 million.” Last spring, she took an unpaid leave of absence from Goldman to work on her husband’s campaign.
Cruz, evidently, didn’t see any contradiction between his family’s ties to Wall Street and the political positions he was taking on the stump. He even acknowledged, when asked about the company earlier this year, that Goldman is a member of the dastardly cartel that’s bilking the American people. “Like many other players on Wall Street and big business, they seek out and get special favors from government,” he said, according to an investigative story in the Times.
Going into tonight’s G.O.P. debate, in South Carolina, the Times story is the talk of the political class. The author, Mike McIntire, revealed that, in 2012, Cruz used a loan that his wife took out from Goldman to help to finance his successful Senate campaign, during which he honed his reputation as a critic of bank bailouts and corporate cronyism. The Goldman loan, which was for between two hundred and fifty thousand and half a million dollars, wasn’t disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, as it should have been. Rather than publicly acknowledging its existence, Cruz subsequently told reporters that he and his wife had liquidated practically all of their personal savings to help pay for the campaign.
Based on McIntire’s inspection of the annual ethics reports that Cruz and other Senators are obliged to file, which require them to list all of the assets they own, this appears to have been a fib. In addition to taking out the loan from Goldman in 2012, which was a margin loan attached to a brokerage account, the Cruzes took out a credit line, of similar size, from Citibank. Between the beginning and end of 2012, the value of the cash and securities that the family owned didn’t diminish to zero, or anything near it. Rather, it “saw a net increase of as much as $400,000,” McIntire reported.
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