Who Got Rich?

EPISODE 226: Steph Ruhle on the characters hiding behind the chaos.

So the reason I’m talking to my friend Stephanie Ruhle, host of The 11th Hour on MSNBC, is not because we have a coaster in our studio with a Photoshopped image of our old friend A-Rod, as a centaur. Although we do. (More on this later.)

The reason I called Steph is because in her former life — long before she became the senior business analyst for NBC News — she decided to work on Wall Street.

And I thought of her as soon as the economy began to feel, to me, like this:

Steph started at Merrill Lynch. And then she went to Credit Suisse, where she became the highest-producing credit derivatives salesperson in the United States. And then she became a managing director at Deutsche Bank, working in Global Markets Senior Relationship Management, for years.

All of which basically means that Steph is the sort of extremely plugged-in finance person who gets tacos with Donald Trump’s former economic advisor, Gary Cohn, who used to be the president of Goldman Sachs. (More on this, too.)

But it also means that she has a special insight into the hidden dynamics behind one of the most insane weeks in the history of the American economy: a backstage world that has more to do with inner circles and inside information than anything resembling coherent economic policy.

YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Exhausted,

Pablo