WALL STREET’S MISPLACED WHINING…. All things being equal, Wall Street should be pretty happy about how things have gone over the last few years. The financial industry’s recklessness, mismanagement, and fraudulent business practices nearly destroyed the global economy, but Wall Street received a pretty generous bailout package to help stop the bleeding.
The darn Obama administration insisted that the industry had to pay back the money we lent them, but Wall Street isn’t exactly in position to complain — big government rescued their asses. Indeed, over the last two years, the financial industry has seen bluer skies than most — massive bonuses have returned to bailed out banks, corporate profits have soared, the private sector is where nearly all of the new jobs are being created, and all of the major investment indexes are way up. Voters were even kind enough to reward right-wing House Republicans, who make no effort to hide the fact that they intend to “serve” the banks, Wall Street executives, and hedge fund elites.
And yet, they keep complaining anyway.
On the mental list of slights and outrages that just about every major figure on Wall Street is believed to keep on President Barack Obama, add this one: When he met recently with a group of CEOs at Blair House, there was no representative from any of the six biggest banks in America.
Not one!
“If they don’t hate us anymore, why weren’t any of us there?” a senior executive at one of the Big Six banks said recently in trying to explain his hostility toward the president.
Politico reported that Wall Street hates President Obama and his team with “an almost irrational passion,” as bankers and their lobbyists regard the administration “with a disdain so thick it often blurs to naked loathing.”
Why? There are a variety of reasons, including the fact that the president has dared to blame Wall Street publicly for Wall Street’s extraordinary mistakes. But much of it seems boil down to the industry’s feelings being hurt.
[D]espite recent White House efforts to reach out to Wall Street, bankers believe Obama is much more worried about perceptions on the left.
As evidence, bankers point to recent White House meetings with labor leaders, Geithner’s dinner with the heads of progressive groups and Vice President Joe Biden’s recent pledge to fight the top-rate tax cuts again in two years.
And it is this, as much as anything, that gets under Wall Street’s collective skin.
“All that people in this White House seem to worry about is what The Huffington Post is going to say if they do something, anything, remotely pro-business,” one financial executive said. “They really don’t care what we think at all.”
Remember, Wall Street screwed up so royally, it nearly destroyed global capitalism, and very nearly caused a catastrophic meltdown of international markets.
And now this gang is stomping its feet because they’re not invited for White House chats, and the president occasionally calls them out, refusing to take the industry’s orders the way Republicans do.
Down the rabbit hole we go.
