STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 4 May 2012

[Demeter]

6. Obama’s Not-So-Hot Date With Wall Street

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/obamas-not-so-hot-date-with-wall-street.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp&pagewanted=print

...“You call some people on Wall Street up, and they’re undecided,” one Obama bundler said. “They’re ‘waiting for clarity’ — that’s the term they use. Or they say the administration ‘hasn’t led sufficiently’ on an issue.”

Still, there were some factors working in Obama’s favor. The Republican primary — which forced Romney far to the right on issues like immigration and reproductive rights — had soured some Wall Streeters on his chances to win in November. And negotiations over the implementation of the new Dodd-Frank financial regulations had made large Wall Street institutions, chiefly banks, wary of open war with the White House. “Most of them are scared stiff of the president,” a top Romney bundler on Wall Street told me recently. “Including the ones on our side.”

But by the beginning of the year, it had also become obvious to many on Wall Street that Obama’s campaign was going to take a populist turn. Some bankers believed that the administration’s strategy was to talk tough in public and play damage control in private, and they were sick of playing along...

YEAH, THAT ONE GETS OLD REAL FAST.

...the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.

Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.

One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich? Around the table, some people shook their heads in disbelief.

“Most people in the financial world,” a top Obama donor later told me, “do not understand how most of America feels about them.” But they think they understand how the president’s inner circle feels about them. “This administration has a more contemptuous view of big money and of Wall Street than any administration in 40 years,” the donor said. “And it shows.”

YOU'D NEVER KNOW IT.