Investing.com -- Incoming White House special advisor Carl Icahn is seeking a regulatory reduction that will make it easier for U.S. corporations to raise capital, and hire new workers, according to press reports.
Icahn, 80, a long-time friend of President-elect Trump, and a billionaire investor, in his own right, is quoted this week as saying, "“You want jobs, you gotta have investment; you want investment, you gotta get rid of some regs.”
A sometimes gruff, admittedly "blue collar" native of the Queens borough of New York City, and graduate of Princeton University, Icahn is reported to have said that, under the current Obama administration, many corporations "see themselves at war with the government."
Reform of the implementing regulations at the Securities and Exhange Commission for the Sarbannes-Oxley law, and the Dodd-Frank legistation, might mark a peace treaty with corporate America, analysts said.
Don't think for a minute that Icahn, who made a career of taking over poorly managed, distressed public companies, wants to give carte blanche to corporations, or enact some Ayn Rand-style libertarian laissez-faire regime in Washington, however. He is quoted as saying, that there needs to be "better accountability in corporate America."
That position seems to conform to the vision outlined by another key Trump staff member, senior strategist and counsel to the incoming President, Steve Bannon, who called for a return to a more "spiritual" form of capitalism, rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, during remarks at the Vatican in 2014.
State capitalism, as practiced by the Russians and the Chinese, is of concern. But there is another worry as well for the new White House team. "The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism," said Bannon. "That form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the enlightened capitalism of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them."