Welcome back to Dry Powder.

I'm William D. Cohan, a best-selling author and former senior M&A banker. Thanks for your interest in Puck, our new media company covering the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. 

As always, if you're enjoying these previews of my private email, consider subscribing or sharing the subscription link with a friend. Today I'm sharing my thoughts on Bridgewater C.E.O. David McCormick's soon-to-be-announced Senate run, as well as on the death of Jimmy Cayne, the sui generis Bear Stearns C.E.O. who saw the firm through its rise and fall. 

McCormick’s Senate Run & the Remarkable Jimmy Cayne

Notes on David McCormick’s Trump Lite playbook, Chamath’s SPAC folly, more meme-stock insanity, and the passing of a Wall Street icon.

Each week, I receive feedback from readers and sources about Wall Street’s biggest characters and concerns. I’ll be engaging with some of those questions here—in addition to a few observations of my own.

David McCormick, the highly respected C.E.O. of Bridgewater, appears to be adopting the Trump-era “populist” playbook for his Senate run in Pennsylvania, with help from Hope Hicks, Cliff Sims and, incredibly, Stephen Miller. What is he thinking, and what does Wall Street make of it?

I know and like David. I also know and like (and have written about) his wife, Dina Powell, a partner at Goldman Sachs and a member of the management committee who served for nearly a year as Deputy National Security Advisor under Donald Trump. They are both smart, charming, and fun company. And David has long been interested in politics. He worked in the Commerce Department and as an economic adviser in the White House before becoming undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs under George W. Bush. Perhaps just as important, he’s probably had enough of the Ray Dalio show at this point—he’s been the sole C.E.O. of Bridgewater Associates, Dalio’s hedge fund, since April 2020 and was co-C.E.O. for three years before that. 

Running for Senate from Pennsylvania strikes me as the kind of challenge that a Gulf War veteran, such as McCormick, would enjoy. He’s got a killer resume to boot. In addition to his 12 years at Bridgewater, he was a consultant at McKinsey for three years, has a PhD from Princeton, and was the C.E.O. of Freemarkets, Inc., a software manufacturer, before it was acquired for some $500 million by Ariba, in 2004. He then served as Ariba’s president for a year. There is no question in my mind that he’d make a great senator and, in any event, a better politician than celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz. 

I have always thought that David had superb judgment. So if he is willing to dive into electoral politics at a high level, I figure he must know what he’s getting himself into. He certainly can afford the best strategists. That’s why I am really scratching my head with his decision to employ the former Trump advisors Hope Hicks and Stephen Miller. These two are seriously damaged goods, especially Miller, a feral nativist with the personality of an orphaned rabid dog, who I have also written about extensively and who distinguished himself in the Trump administration as perhaps the most vicious, callous and Darwinian of them all—and that’s saying something in that crowd! 

Why David would tap Miller is beyond me, unless his involvement is mere window dressing to make sure he’s locked down the Trump vote in Pennsylvania—a group he would probably have anyway. For this, he received a fawning endorsement from Breitbart. 

But my assumption is that Hicks, Miller, and Sims are just tertiary figures in the mix...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT