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Even as the three-week-old protests against Wall Street grow louder, Wall Street itself remains silent.
As the “Occupy Wall Street” movement continues to spread across the nation, the traders, bankers and hedge-fund managers targeted as the “1 percent” have barely weighed in on the protests.
The few that have opined tend to express sympathy, if not always support, for the movement.
“The protesting is a statement the future is very clouded for a lot of people,” Larry Fink, CEO of giant investment firm BlackRock, said earlier this week at in event in Toronto.
“These are not lazy people sitting around looking for something to do,” he added. “We have people losing hope and they’re going into the street, whether it’s justified or not.”
“I think people are understandably angry,” Neel Kashkari, the head of equities for money-management firm Pimco, said this week on CNBC. “The financial crisis was deeply unfair.”
Even hedge-fund manager George Soros, whose wealth is estimated at $22 billion by Forbes, said he can understand the protesters’ grievances.
At a United Nations conference on Monday, Soros compared small business owners — many of which went out of business during the downturn — with the banks, which received government aid and then paid “bumper bonuses.”
Anthony Scaramucci, the outspoken head of SkyBridge Capital, is among the few to publicly disagree with the protests.
In a Twitter post, Scaramucci called the movement “a transparent joke, a hoax brought on with tired ideas to slouch people to mediocrity.”
Other financial execs likely feel the same way even if they don’t make their feelings public.
One investment-banking exec, who declined to be identified, said he feels Wall Street is being unfairly blamed and said he doesn’t understand why mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, among others, aren’t taking more heat.
Several high-profile banking and financial executives declined to comment to The Post on the protests, including Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Bank of America chief Brian Moynihan.
Even financial chieftains who skirted blame for the financial crisis, like investment gurus Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman, either declined to comment or didn’t return phone calls.
“I think they feel that they’re in a no-win situation,” said Adam Hanft, a branding expert on Wall Street and other financial professionals, who are often lumped in with the Wall Street banks.
“I think Wall Street’s brand in general has been tarnished so much,” he said. “I think they just want to keep their heads down.”