Economists Are Out. Goldman Is Back In.

It looks like Gary Cohn will be leaving Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where he is president and chief operating officer, to become director of Donald Trump's National Economic Council. This is not a unique career trajectory!

The first director of the NEC, which President Bill Clinton created in 1993 to coordinate economic policy among the sometimes-warring government agencies responsible for it, was Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman and co-senior partner of Goldman (which didn't believe in titles like "president" or "chief executive" back in those pre-initial-public-offering days). Then, in 2002, the other half of Rubin's Goldman-running duo, Stephen Friedman, became director of George W. Bush's NEC. If Cohn in fact takes the job, there will have been as many former top Goldman executives in charge of the NEC as Ph.D. economists.