“At the top are immigration, trade, taxes, reforming government. I think all of those likely fall above this issue. The challenge – and we’ve been through this exercise a couple of times over the past 16 years – is that it’s really complicated, and it’s a couple of hundred billion dollars in terms of the equity stakes in these enterprises.”
Stakes are simply too high to risk approaching the issue with an ill-thought-out plan, Fratantoni said, with plenty that could go wrong in that case.
“It’s a six-trillion-dollar-plus market, so you don’t want to mess this up,” he said. “You want to do it very cautiously and methodically. And the downside of getting it wrong is really extraordinarily risky.
“There’s an upside of getting it right – there are some benefits – but I think it would take the full attention of the Treasury Secretary, of folks in the White House to get this done and so it’s going to depend on what happens with those other priorities and whether they have enough time and energy to focus on this really complex endeavor.”
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