Wall Street's Confused Position on Trump

There are few places in the world where numbers are taken more seriously than Wall Street. So it was that in the days following Donald Trump’s data-defying upset in the presidential election, even the Masters of the Universe were struggling to comprehend the course of human events. “A Trump rally?” repeated Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein Thursday, after Andrew Ross Sorkin, the host of the Times’ annual “DealBook” conference for market movers and shakers, asked him about what some pundits had termed the market’s unexpectedly buoyant reaction to the news. “Oh, no, in the market,” said Blankfein, a Clinton supporter whose face Trump had actually used in an anti-elites campaign ad and who had certainly never shown it at one of Trump’s notoriously boisterous campaign events. The audience laughed weakly. The mood was, as one investment banker put it, “manic depressive.” PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had railed against the president-elect’s sexism and racism, respectively, but said they were hoping for the best. “It’s a great day to be an American,” said the CEO of Oppenheimer Funds, a sponsor, in his speech.â?? â??“â??Fully half the country thinks we are going to hellâ??.”