Wall Street’s Web Of Big Money Catches The Flies

Wall Street is the villain in just about every politician’s narratives. Wall Street must be reigned in, they say. Wall Street is a den of slimy corruption and “greed,” goes the political mantra. Just look at the storyline and the popularity of Showtime’s Billions, in which an ambitious U.S. Attorney relentlessly tries to bring down a super-ambitious, self-made hedge fund billionaire god for allegedly violating SEC regulations and federal laws. (Some people today would ask if it’s even possible to become wealthy without violating regulations and laws, there are so many on the books.) This brilliantly acted show tells the story of the tension (and the interchange) between Wall Street and the political class.

Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders is calling out his arch rival Hillary Clinton for her strong ties to Wall Street. Hillary does the same to Bernie. Both insist that the other’s Wall Street relationships must be corrupt. (The pot calling the kettle “black”?)

Sanders and Clinton are both left-wing politicians. But the Republicans, who are seen by their opponents as supporters of “big business” (which just has to be corrupt), are also attacking Wall Street. Senator Ted Cruz, a Harvard-educated attorney, continually distances himself from Wall Street and claims that he ought to be elected President because he isn’t beholden to that American symbol and embodiment of capitalism. (Cruz’s wife, Heidi, works for Goldman Sachs.) Those who work on Wall Street are even afraid of someone who is one of their own: famous billionaire and Republican Presidential front-runner Donald Trump.

As part of his campaign stump, Trump has called out Wall Street CEOs’ salaries as being usually unearned and undeserved. He has brought up that word “greed,” and smeared Wall Street bankers with it. He has attacked Wall Street hedge fund managers for being given too many tax breaks. He has gone so far as to vilify giant American companies, Ford and Apple, for manufacturing their products in other countries. Wall Street insiders also see Trump as a freewheeling firebrand who may seriously disrupt the flow of business by, for instance, demanding different monetary policy from the Federal Reserve or raising taxes on the rich to placate middle-class constituents.

Wall Street worker Greg Valliere, chief strategist for Horizon Investments, says, “He scares the markets. He is a big uncertainty. The market does not like uncertainty.”

Mark Perry of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute says, “He doesn’t fit into any particular economic mold, he’s not a traditional conservative like Ronald Reagan. His platform is really kind of a mixed bag of populist and isolationist types of policies that, he knows, will appeal to a lot of uninformed people.”

One Wall Street banker succinctly puts it that “He is crazy, he has crazy policies.”

If one of their own would scare them as President, can it be any wonder that so many Wall Street managers and CEOs are allegedly paranoid?

The media also loves to attack Wall Street while doing a lot of licking of government lawyers’ and politicians’ boots. Journalists seem ever ready to claim that just about everyone on Wall Street is a “wolf.” Again, supporters of capitalism often wonder if most of the “misconduct” of Wall Street workers is what the government calls it when they try to operate without their hands tied behind their backs by thick regulatory red tape. Critics, meanwhile, say that the unimaginably large amount of wealth engendered by Wall Street is too much for the corrupt to resist dipping their hands into.

Wall Street is demonized so much in this country by politicians and the media that some libertarians, who are the staunchest supporters of laissez-faire capitalism in the United States, opine that the name “capitalism” needs to be replaced by a different, more accurate word. After all, they point out (correctly), the word “capitalism” is really a Marxist and socialist smear.

In the end, while Sanders, Clinton, Cruz, and Trump bludgeon each other over their Wall Street ties, the stock market keeps on ticking.

[Image via Shutterstock]