Sen. Ted Cruz has been two-faced on Goldman Sachs, the giant investment bank: Even while he was publicly decrying the behemoth bank as an agent for “crony capitalism,” he reportedly borrowed as much as $1 million from them to finance his political ambitions.
Cruz and his wife took out a low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, and another from Citibank, without the required disclosure to the Federal Election Commission, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The Texas senator used the loans to help finance the 2012 Senate campaign that vaulted him onto the national political stage and positioned him for his current presidential run.
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It’s not the only benefit he has accrued from Goldman Sachs: He was covered under the company’s health insurance plan when his wife worked at the bank as a VP. The coverage only expired last year when she decided to take a leave of absence from the organization to help with his presidential campaign.
“I am unabashedly proud about everything about Heidi,” Cruz has said in the past, when challenged over why he hadn’t mentioned his wife’s association with Goldman when he launched his campaign. “And I did mention the fact that she had an incredibly successful business career.”
All of this makes his public stances on Goldman Sachs appear even more hypocritical. He has called out the bank as being one of the worst examples of the noxious nexus between Wall Street and Washington.
(The company received $12.9 billion from the U.S. Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, through the bailout of AIG, at the time the world’s largest insurance company. The money was later returned, but only after Goldman was publicly excoriated for paying hundreds of employees bonuses of $1 million or more.)
“Goldman is one of the biggest banks on Wall Street, and my criticism with Washington is they engage in crony capitalism. They give favors to Wall Street and big business and that’s why I’ve been an outspoken opponent of crony capitalism, taking on leaders in both parties,” Cruz said last March in an interview with Bloomberg.
“Like many other players on Wall Street and big business, they seek out and get special favors from government,” Cruz continued. “I think they’re entitled to practice their business, but without subsidies or special benefits.”
Publicly, Cruz has taken an aggressive stance against the big banks. pronouncing during the Fox Business Network debate in November that he would “absolutely not” bail out the big banks again. If a bank such as Bank of America were on the brink of failure, he said, he would allow it to fail. And he has announced his distaste for big banks, which he has said “get in bed with big government.”
Sen. Ted Cruz also has the support of hedge fund CEO Robert Mercer, a billionaire who is all in for Cruz’s presidential campaign. Mercer is under investigation for billions in unpaid taxes.
The Cruz campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Cruz spokeswoman told the Times that the failure to report the Goldman Sachs loan was “inadvertent.”
