The voluble Goldman Sachs economist who drew President Trump’s fury this week has backed lefty government spending for years – and even once wrote a $2,300 check to fund Barack Obama’s first White House bid, On The Money has learned.
Jan Hatzius – a fixture on financial TV and the chief spokesman of the firm’s economic forecasting – was one of the few economists who called the housing bubble that led to the 2008 financial crisis. He has also pushed for progressive policies over the years, say right-of-center Wall Streeters who have studied his economic forecasts.
Now Hatzius is targeting Trump’s tariff war with a research note this week predicting that US consumers will bear the brunt of it. That drew a sharp rebuke from The Donald, who first went after Goldman CEO David Solomon – tweaking him over his controversial DJing hobby.
“I think that David should go out and get himself a new Economist or, maybe, he ought to just focus on being a DJ and not bother running a major Financial Institution,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They made a bad prediction a long time ago on both the Market repercussions and the Tariffs themselves, and they were wrong, just like they are wrong about so much else.”
Noting that tariffs could get passed on to consumers isn’t exactly far-fetched economic thinking, of course. On Thursday, the producer price index spiked, though other gauges suggest inflation remains largely in check.
Still, critics maintain that Hatzius has been touting left-of-center economic policies from his influential perch for years. One jaw-dropping example came during the 2024 election, when Hatzius said Kamala Harris’s economic policies – which included socialism in the form of price controls on groceries, tax hikes and open borders – was net-net better than Trump’s, which included deregulation and tax cuts in addition to tariffs.
“He is way to the left in his understanding of the economy,” said one top economist who has followed Hatzius’ work and asked not to be named. “He’s much like a career Fed staffer and worse because he’s partisan.”
Hatzius joined Goldman in 1997. Over the years, he championed massive spending edicts during Democratic presidencies of Barack Obama and then Joe Biden, including their moves to ramp up regulations and seek tax increases that hurt job creation.
And while some of Hatzius’ calls have been spot on, others have been way off the mark, his detractors say. The Fed missed the inflationary spike during the Biden years because it was too worried about growth and Hatzius wasn’t exactly a critic of the Biden spending blowout.
In fact, Hatzius has spoken lovingly about printing money, aka quantitative easing, another reason for higher inflation during Sleepy Joe’s reign. He thinks the Fed should be actively managing the economy rather than simply looking to stem the tide of inflation.
On top of it all, the only time Hatzius appears to have financially supported a presidential candidate over the past two decades was with his $2,300 donation to Obama in 2007, according to campaign finance records.
He also gave $1,000 to the Democratic Party in 2004, the records show.
In 2012, Fortune labeled Hatzius “Obama’s Best Friend at Goldman Sachs,” for his cheerleading of the Democrat’s policies. That was when Goldman also gained the nickname “Government Sachs” for the pipeline of talent moving from its boardroom to Cabinet positions in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
A Goldman spokesman declined to comment when fully briefed on this report; through the spokesman Hatzius declined comment.
Others at the investment bank did push back on the notion that Hatzius is ideological in the way he does his job. They note his research often moves markets, how many of his calls have been prescient, including the prediction of the subprime crisis. They insist he’s bipartisan in analyzing policy, and recently briefed some GOP lawmakers on the economy.
“How progressive can he be if Republicans would want to hear his thoughts?” one executive said.
“Jan’s research is for clients — they make investment decisions based on his research. Year after year he and his team are recognized as the most accurate. This wouldn’t be true if his research was political.”
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