Business

Bloomberg Xs & O

A business headline has the White House hopping mad.

Bloomberg News yesterday ran a story that suggested President Obama had reversed course on fat-cat compensation, and — surprise — doesn’t mind the huge bonuses paid to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Bloomberg News ran excerpts from a forthcoming Bloomberg BusinessWeek story under the headline: “Obama doesn’t begrudge bonuses for Blankfein, Dimon.”

The White House went so far as to release a transcript of the Oval Office interview to bolster their claim that Obama’s statements were taken out of context and that his stance has not changed.

The BusinessWeek story quotes Obama as saying: “I know both those guys [Blankfein and Dimon]; they are savvy businessmen. I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”

But according to the transcript, Obama followed that statement with: “I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance.”

“The president has said countless times, as he did in the interview, that he doesn’t ‘begrudge’ the success of Americans,” said White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “But he also expressed ‘shock’ at the size of bonuses and made clear that there are a number of steps that need to be taken to change the culture of Wall Street — a sentiment he has consistently expressed since long before he took office.”

The White House pointed to an interview Obama did with Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly before the 2008 election, in which he decried the level of pay and bonuses doled out in the financial sector.

Obama did not directly attack the bonuses of either executive in the transcript released by the White House or the BusinessWeek story, but the president was generally critical of outsize compensation.

Bloomberg LP and BusinessWeek said they were unaware that the White House had objected to the headline and aspects of the story, but said they were not changing it in updates on the news service.

The full article hits newsstands tomorrow.

The interview was BusinessWeek’s first with Obama since Bloomberg LP paid McGraw-Hill $9.4 million for the weekly title last year. keith.kelly@nypost.com