Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman: Obama Doing Fine on Economy

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The CEO and co-founder of Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman, has given President Obama high marks on the economy. Unfortunately for him, though, Women’s Wear Daily has given him the poor grade of C for his wardrobe.

Schwarzman told Yahoo Finance that he does not see the latest figures on the U.S. economy in such a bad light. He said, “The U.S. is doing fine. It seems we always have odd announcements from the U.S. government in the first quarter. According to them, it was two-tenths of 1% growth [in Q1 this year.] The previous year, which we thought was completely ridiculous, they reported the economy had gone down 2.4%.”

The Blackstone head also stated that he sees the chances of there being another meltdown like the one that the U.S. suffered in 2008 being very, very low.

He personally earned $690 million from Blackstone last year. A lot of that came from real estate. Schwarzman explained that when a business like his invests in a property, it makes improvements to the asset which raise its market value. This is in contrast to what happened ten years ago when there was a bubble in the private home market which caused the recession when it burst.

Schwarzman added, “Securities go up and down, for sure. You go slightly over trend when things are growing because…of leverage, and we go under when things get weaker. But on the whole it’s a steady trend upwards. All you have to do is hold on during the downs and you get overly rewarded a bit on the way up.”

Meanwhile, the 68 year old may want to rethink his choice of suits if Women’s Wear Daily knows what it is talking about.

In a piece which grades 8 prominent men on their style, the magazine gave Schwarzman a grade of C. It wrote, “For a man with such short legs and small feet, he needs a shorter blazer and a more fitted pair of pants.”

So Steven if you are reading this, spend a little of your estimated $13 billion fortune on some new threads.