Wall Street shuns Trump's Cleveland convention

Wall Street executives are hitting the sell button on the GOP convention in Cleveland next week.

Bankers typically use the quadrennial Republican Party gathering to schmooze clients, host parties and flaunt their connections to the nominee and other senior officials. In 2012, they flooded Tampa Bay to celebrate one of the industry’s favorite sons, Mitt Romney, getting the nomination.


But with real estate mogul Donald Trump running on an anti-trade, populist platform — while sporting sky-high unpopularity ratings — many bankers and traders want nothing to do with the convention this year.

Neither do most corporate CEOs. The prospect of Trump bashing trade deals and talking about building a wall with Mexico, coupled with the threat of potentially disruptive protests, is largely keeping the financial world away from Cleveland.

“With Trump you have what is a fairly divisive campaign and you have the potential of unnecessarily offending a whole bunch of people if you show up there in a prominent way,” said Matt McDonald, a partner at consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies which does business with some of the nation’s biggest banks. “On top of that a lot of the people that you might want to get in front of for one reason or another are not going to be there.”



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/donald-trump-wall-street-convention-225441#ixzz4EHe0dmkx