Charles Gasparino

Charles Gasparino

Opinion

Don’t cry for Wall Street

Wall Street is really, really unhappy with the president it helped give us — but there’s absolutely no sign these guys have learned their lesson.

Wall Street honcho John Mack said recently that the feds should “stop beating up” on his pals Lloyd Blankfien and Jamie Dimon, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Dimon has described today’s regulatory environment as “relentless — just like the Mafia.” Blankfein is so cowed that he barely speaks publicly anymore except to embrace politically correct issues such as gay marriage.

Sorry: The Wall Street power brokers are certainly prime targets of President Obama’s class warfare, but these guys are far from innocent.

Turn back the clock a bit first to the 1990s, when Mack, Blankfein and Dimon met their first love: President Bill Clinton. A limousine liberal’s dream, he professed a “moderation” on social issues while he let the banks get away with just about anything they wanted, included killing Glass-Steagall — a smart law that kept risk-taking in the trading markets from infecting government-insured customer deposits.

After Glass-Steagall finally died, they all made gobs of money, so much that by 2007 they felt confident enough in their ability to mold regulatory policy that they began embracing the Democratic Party’s two presidential frontrunners.

For a time, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton split the Wall Street honcho vote. Mack came out first for Hillary, explaining how he liked her embrace of universal health care — the same formula now slamming the economy and the public.

Blankfein moved into the Hillary corner as well, while his No. 2 at Goldman, Gary Cohn, joined Blackrock’s Larry Fink and others to support Obama. And when Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton, the Wall Street stampede to the former community organizer shifted into high gear.

Not even the looming financial crisis that threatened the survival of all the big banks could stop the Wall Street money from flowing into Obamaland. Sen. John McCain, the hapless Republican challenger, could barely get an audience or a buck from the fat-cat crowd.

When the crisis hit in the fall of 2008, Obama blamed the on Republican— without a peep from the bankers about the absurdity of that claim. And why should they? They’d done very well off Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall, and their crowd had also found ways to make big profits from Clinton’s loosening of mortgage-lending standards — two of the root causes of the financial collapse.

The banking barons thought they had the best of both worlds: a bailout from the Bush crew, and a friend coming to replace him in a few months.

“Obama is a moderate,” Fink told anyone who’d listen. Dimon told people he believed Obama was smart enough to understand the banking industry’s needs. Mack voiced similar support, while Blankfein reveled in the fact that his Goldman Sachs was the second-largest contributor to the new president after the hyperliberal University of California.

But the affair started turning sour as Obama seized on a tactic to salvage his falling approval ratings in late 2009 when he used a “60 Minutes” interview to launch a new rhetorical assault on fat cats. After the “shellacking” of Democrats in 2010, the president took the class warfare into even higher gear.

By then Mack was no longer CEO of Morgan Stanley, but Blankfein and Dimon were still here to kick around some more, which the president’s minions have done almost nonstop ever since.

It’s not just the Dodd-Frank “financial reforms” that have rankled the Wall Street crowd; the constant name-calling by the guy they supported hurts almost as much as the punitive fines that Obama’s Justice Department and other regulators have squeezed out of the banks on a seemingly daily basis.

After supporting Mitt Romney in 2013, many of these honchos have moved back to the Dems, particularly Hillary. Wall Streeters tell me they believe the Democratic Party is finally lightening up on the class warfare attacks, pointing to the lack of direct banker-bashing in Obama’s last State of the Union speech. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

John Mack has a point, at least superficially: The regulatory assault against JP Morgan had all the appearances of a mob shakedown, since Attorney General Eric Holder muscled $13 billion from Dimon after Dimon had criticized Obama’s policies. And yes, Obama’s attacks on bankers seem mainly to be futile attempts to divert attention from the lousy economy and his lousy economic policies.

But if Mack & Co. were completely honest, they’d at least own up to some of the blame for making Obama our president.

Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.