HARRISBURG, Pa. (news agencies) — Before he ran for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, David McCormick was a big name on Wall Street.
He was the CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund, a world-traveled executive who was sought after for speaking engagements and prominent board positions.
His wealth and connections got him flagged by Republicans as someone who could both raise campaign cash and pay his own way for a Senate campaign.
But McCormick’s Wall Street days haven’t been such an asset of late. They provided grist for attacks by Republican primary rivals in McCormick’s failed 2022 run for Senate and now by Democrats in his challenge to third-term Sen. Bob Casey.
Casey, in speeches and ads, hammers away at investments made by Bridgewater Associates while McCormick was CEO, including in Chinese companies that are considered part of Beijing’s military and surveillance industrial complex.
“While I was fighting for union rights and fighting for working families in Pennsylvania, he was making a lot of money investing in China,” Casey recently told a union crowd at a Teamsters hall in suburban Harrisburg. “He not only invested in Chinese companies, he invested in companies that built the Chinese military.”
McCormick declined an interview request.
The need to fend off accusations that he profited at America’s expense comes at an unfortunate time for McCormick as China’s relationship with Washington has grown increasingly tense.
But Bridgewater was hardly alone.
U.S. investment in Chinese companies surged while McCormick was Bridgewater’s CEO as hedge funds, institutional investors and fund managers plunged money into those same companies.
Some still do, according to a congressional report released this year after both the Trump and Biden administrations tried to block American investment in what they viewed as China’s military and surveillance apparatus.
America’s political community soured on China as early as 2016, but the U.S. financial sector “plowed right through that,” said Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington who served on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The economic ties extend beyond Wall Street. Semiconductor companies, farmers, tech and others in manufacturing rely on China for customers or components, Scissors said.
As Bridgewater’s CEO in 2019, McCormick described China as America’s “most defining bilateral relationship of our time,” even as calls began in Washington to block American investments in Chinese companies that could pose a threat to U.S. security.
As a candidate, McCormick has described China as an “existential” threat to the United States. He called for the federal government to develop a comprehensive strategy for America to outperform China economically and technologically, and said his experience with China means he can go “toe to toe” with its government on trade issues.
But McCormick also defends himself, both minimizing Bridgewater’s investments in China, saying it was 2% of the company’s assets, and describing investment in China as “unavoidable” because of client expectations and the rapid growth of that country’s economy.
In a book he published last year, he wrote: “As is, U.S. dollars finance Communist China’s most egregious acts and ambitions.”
While campaigning, McCormick barely talks about his time at the hedge fund. If he mentions it at all, he tells audiences he ran a “financial firm” or an “investment firm.”
Instead, he dwells on other entries on his resume. Those include playing football and wrestling in high school, graduating from the U.S. military academy at West Point and serving with the Army in the first Gulf War, where he won a Bronze Star.
But if he is not talking up his Wall Street days, Wall Street does not seem to care. In his two campaigns for Senate, super political action committees that support McCormick have raised tens of millions of dollars and counting from the finance world.
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