Jeb Bush turned out to be such a bad investment for bankers at Goldman Sachs that the hundreds of thousands of dollars they threw at him has become a company joke, according to Bloomberg. After donating almost $900,000 in the first half of 2015 to four favorite candidates and their fundraising committees, the firm’s bankers gave about $243,000 in the second half, Federal Election Commission filings released Sunday show.
As Bloomberg continues,
Marco Rubio took over from Bush as the preferred candidate of Goldman Sachs donors, who gave the Florida senator about $118,000 in the second half of 2015, almost twice what he got in the first six months. Even so, the sum wasn’t close to the more than $700,000 that bankers at the firm gave Bush and his fundraising groups in the first half of the year. Their contributions plunged in the second half to about $47,000.
“It’s like buying a stock and watching it fall,” said Steven Shafran, a former Goldman Sachs partner who contributed to Bush’s super PAC and was a senior adviser at the Treasury Department to Hank Paulson, once the head of the bank. “Putting good money after bad? He certainly has enough for now. I think people are waiting to see if there’s someone they can support and who has a chance to win. If Jeb has a good New Hampshire, my guess is Goldman guys will pile back in again.”
As Jeb spent the most of anyone...
"In hindsight, they may regret giving the money -- or not, I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t over..." said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who was a Goldman Sachs partner until 1987, adding that "the money he raised early was largely in order to give him the chance to blow the others away early, which we know he did not do."
No he did not...
Source: RealClearPolitics
The early burst of money didn’t go as far as Goldman Sachs bankers would have hoped for Bush, Rubio and Ted Cruz, who trail billionaire Donald Trump in polls going into Monday’s Iowa caucuses. Even Hillary Clinton, their preferred Democrat, is locked in a close race in the Midwest state with Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who unveiled an ad last week decrying the firm’s political clout.