QOTD: Negotiated Ideology

I think that the current president is quite practical in terms of being willing to change his positions and is quite practical in terms of what’s effective, what can work. He’s very driven on execution and has some very strong ideas on regulatory reforms and changes in tax. I would say he’s extremely pro-growth, which gets described as pro-business, but it’s really pro-growth, pro-job creation. Every president has some type of ideology, and the current president is basically a capitalist who believes in efficiency. I think that’s what his ideology is. So whenever he sees something that is inconsistent with efficiency, he’ll abandon what he said before in order to get to execution. The previous government was different. They had a very strong ideology, which wasn’t necessarily as simple as capitalism.

What I’ve found in being around political people is they’re willing to negotiate their ideology somewhere around 5 percent. They believe that’s really stepping out. And it’s really hard to do business when you only move 5 percent from your ideology. So you have to take each of these people as who they are and work with them.

- Steve Schwarzman (Blackstone)