In public, President Obama is on a tear against Wall Street. In private, not so much
Over the weekend, Obama attacked fat-cat investment bankers, telling “60 Minutes” he didn’t become president to aid and abet Wall Street — which, only a year after the financial meltdown and taxpayer bailout, is now scheduled to hand out tens of billions of dollars in bonuses to its bankers and traders.
But the president’s meeting yesterday with the CEOs of the largest banks was nearly a lovefest, I’m told by attendees.
Yes, White House spinmeisters advertised the gathering as a chance for Obama to channel the public’s disgust over Wall Street’s celebrating while Main Street still suffers 10 percent unemployment, thanks largely to Wall Street’s bungling. But that’s not what he did.
Obama started off with the obvious, reminding bankers that the bailout of insurance giant AIG benefited them because it meant they could actually collect on the AIG insurance policies (credit-default swaps) on their risky bond-market bets. But he also seemed to concede their dubious claim that some of them probably would’ve survived an AIG collapse, given all the other billions the government threw at them during the crisis.
After that, people with first-hand knowledge of the sitdown said, it was a heavily scripted affair — with none of the fireworks Obama displays in public.
Indeed, the White House last week sent the CEOs the president’s talking points: bonuses (too high), lending (more loans to small businesses), the need for more regulation of the financial business (support the bill now before Congress), etc.
So there were no surprises for the likes of Jaime Dimon of JP Morgan, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, John Mack of Morgan Stanley or Citigroup’s Richard Parsons. Said one CEO who attended: “I expected to be taken to the woodshed, but the tone was quite the opposite.”
Said another senior exec with knowledge of the meeting: “The whole thing was so telegraphed that not much was accomplished, other than giving Obama a PR stunt . . . He might have sounded mean on ’60 Minutes,’ but during the meeting he was a hell of a lot nicer.”
Maybe Obama’s softened tone was recognition of Wall Street’s election help. Campaign-finance filings show that firms like Goldman — now getting ready to dish out $20 billion in bonuses after nearly imploding last year — favored Obama over John McCain by a fairly wide margin. Nearly all the major Wall Street CEOs — including Dimon, Blankfein and Mack — have told people that they voted for Obama.
Or maybe he was just tacitly admitting his own role in Wall Street’s rebound. Yes, it was the Bush team that gave special privileges to the big banks and Wall Street firms last year to prevent an implosion of the financial system. But Obama’s team has inexplicably kept those measures in place — and so allowed the banks to rebound to megabonus levels.
The banks’ profits are so huge that even Citigroup — a longtime basket case — now has the wherewithal to repay the tens of billions the government lent it last year and still compensate its traders and bankers this year.
But if you want to know why they’re rolling in the dough, look to Washington.
As a matter of policy, the administration considers “systemically important” firms like Citi, Goldman and Morgan “too big to fail” — signaling the markets that it’ll bail them out if their losses again threaten to shut them down. Plus, Goldman and Morgan Stanley have been declared commercial bank-holding companies (even though you can’t get a car loan or open a checking account at either), so they can borrow from the Federal Reserve in emergencies.
It all translates into cheaper borrowing costs. And the government is also backing up the firms’ long-term debt — so, on top of borrowing from the Fed, Goldman can borrow in the open market at favorable rates.
Throw in the fact that the Fed has kept interest rates near zero — a move that has weakened our national currency but lets financial firms borrow cheap — and you can see how Wall Street has bounced back from the dead so quickly.
Yesterday, the bankers told the president that they aren’t lending because people aren’t borrowing. In fact, small-business-loan volume is down because businessmen fear a future of higher taxes, thanks to “health-care reform” and other high-cost Obama policies.
More important, the banks just aren’t focused on lending — because it’s so easy to make money by trading: Borrow cheaply at the low, government-backed rates, and put that cash in higher-yielding bonds.
On Wall Street, it’s known as the “carry trade” — and the taxpayers are financing the vast profits from it, through all the ways listed above.
There are many reasons to hate Wall Street, even if you haven’t heard Goldman’s Blankfein quip that he’s doing “God’s work” when he trades bonds and earns all that bonus money.
But the ultimate culprit for the fact that these guys are raking it in while the rest of the nation suffers isn’t Blankfein or the Wall Streeters at yesterday’s meeting — it’s their enablers in government, including the man in the White House.
Charles Gasparino, CNBC on- air editor, is author of “The Sell out,” about the Wall Street melt down.