Goldman On Tax Reform: “Now Comes The Hard Part”

The ink wasn’t even dry yet on the just published Republican Tax Cut And Jobs Act, and within the hour UBS was already confident that it has virtually no chance of passing: As UBS chief economist Seth Carpenter wrote shortly after the publication, “to our read, the release confirms our view that tax reform is far from being a done deal. The bill contains several specifics that we believe will prove sticking points, which increase the difficulty of finding the votes to support the plan in both the House and the Senate.” Fast forwarding to Carpenter’s conclusion: “We maintain our view that tax reform is unlikely this year or next.”

To be sure, banks have a right to be skeptical: after all with the economy already growing above 3%, the last thing financial institutions want is for another burst of output courtesy of fiscal stimulus. Last week, Lloyd Blankfein said as much when the Goldman CEO warned “now’s not the best time for tax cuts”, a view diametrically opposite that of his former “right hand man”, Gary Cohn, currently Trump’s chief economic advisor, who said this is precisely the right time for more tax cuts.

“I can’t say this is the moment where you want the most fiscal stimulus in the market, when we’re mostly at full employment, when GDP last registered at 3 percent,” Blankfein said Thursday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “I don’t know that this is the moment that you provide the biggest stimulus.”

Goldman CEO’s skepticism was obvious in a report released this afternoon by economic Alec Phillips, who looked at the tax plan released on Friday, and said that while Goldman still assigns a two-thirds chance of tax reform passing, it conceded that “now comes the hard part.”

First, here are the big picture details: