Wall Street Feeling Burned by Obama

Get out the violins!

This is almost laughable. Carol Platt Liebau asks “what did they expect?” Indeed, what did they expect? I guess they don’t spend much time reading conservative websites and blogs. If they had they wouldn’t have been fooled into thinking Barack Obama was a moderate.

Charles Gasparino writes in the New York Post that Wall Street Executives privately complain about the president and his ruinous policies. I wonder what it cost them to get him elected. It almost serves them right, but the rest of us are stuck with him, too.

I’m told that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers have both complained to senior Wall Street execs that they have almost no say in major policy decisions. Obama economic counselor Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, is barely consulted at all on just about anything — not even issues involving the banking system, of which he is among the world’s leading authorities.

At most, the economic people and their staffs get asked to do cost analyses of Obama’s initiatives for the White House political people — who then ignore their advice.

 [...]

As one CEO of a major financial firm told me: “The economic guys say that when they explain the costs of programs, the policy guys simply thank them for their time and then ignore what they say.”

In other words, the economic people feel that they have almost no say in this administration’s policy decisions.

Wall Street should have seen it coming. Obama was among the most liberal politicians in the country, despite his campaign rhetoric — and his record in Illinois and the Senate showed it. He has spoken glowingly over the years of the need to redistribute wealth, a measure that always leads to taxes on small businesses, the economy’s main economic engine.

The execs who had such hopes for the president are now wondering fearfully just how radical he really is.

It’s almost comical watching the Street’s top players squirm when they hear “class warfare” rhetoric coming from the White House, and it forces them to act in ways they’d never imagined. In addition to recently giving phony speeches about the sins of large compensation packages that they had no problem taking just a few years ago, many Wall Street CEOs are so terrified of being outed as greedy capitalists that they no longer use the corporate credit cards to charge business lunches at their favorite New York restaurants.

The funniest story I’ve heard lately came from a former Wall Street executive and longtime Democrat who anxiously recounted a recent conversation with Obama. The executive said he told the president that he’s at a disadvantage because he’s relatively inexperienced in economic matters during a time of economic crisis. …..

Follow the link above to read the punchline, unless you’ve just had a meal. In that case you may want to wait a little while.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.