Macquarie's Shemara Wikramanayake keeps the faith in Wall Street
The chief executive of the $85 billion investment house says "it will take a long time" before the US' dominance of the financial system fades away.
Macquarie chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake was in the United States during the legislative fight over Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill when she witnessed the age old idiom 'money talks' in action.
The bill originally included a provision, Section 899, which would have levied retaliatory taxes on foreign income. The so-called revenge tax sparked widepread nervousness in the financial community over its impact on the sector.
Then the Wall Street lobbying machine kicked into action.
“My colleagues had been saying we need to get Canberra and the rest of Washington [to lobby over the bill]. The better thing to do is to get to Wall Street. Wall Street was well ahead of us,” she recounted at the JANA annual conference on Thursday.
“So the thing there is, that Wall Street and Washington are very connected, and so that [section 899] came out of the bill.”
