Get ready for some waterworks here.
How do you make it into the Trump administration when, despite your millionaire bona fides, you gave six figures to Hillary Clinton's presidential effort and previously positioned yourself for a spot in a Democratic White House? If you're Craig Phillips, previously of BlackRock and now heading up financial regulatory reform in Steve Mnuchin's Treasury Department, a reputation of making your snowflake colleagues cry evidently doesn't hurt:
Mr. Phillips’ blunt criticism was often perceived as bullying that sometimes brought his staff to tears, [former colleagues] said. One 2016 incident that former colleagues said was representative of his behavior involved a financial-data specialist making a presentation to a group of about 200 BlackRock employees around the world. Mr. Phillips interrupted the man and launched an expletive-filled rant, people who witnessed the event said.
Whether this particular alleged outburst was justified we can't know, suffice to say that the BlackRock employees interviewed by the Wall Street Journal painted a portrait of “both a brilliant financier and a volatile boss prone to dressing down subordinates with expletive-laced tongue-lashings.” So whatever Phillips might be lacking in ideological purity – he's certainly no Ayn Rand – he makes up for it in pure alpha-male brio.
We look forward to his eventual meeting with Elizabeth Warren.
Meet Craig Phillips, the Man in Charge of Trump’s Review of Wall Street Rules [WSJ]
