Wall Street is rallying for Kamala Harris — but will bankers make the same mistake they made with Obama?
Amid the media adulation over the very possible presidency of the former dunderhead-turned-cool brat girl Kamala Harris, Wall Street Democrats aren’t wasting any time using the momentum trying to convince those moneymen and women still on the fence over the November election that Harris is a winner.
Wall Street execs should support her, and they won’t be sorry. Oh yes they will, if history is any guide.
Wall Street is important for presidential candidates for the same reason you rob banks: that’s where the fundraising money is.
It has been my experience that most people in high finance are center-left and center-right, though they can be swayed by spin and vibe.
Recall that in 2008, many middle-of-the-road Wall Street types swooned over the smooth-talking Barack Obama.
“Obama is a moderate,” Larry Fink, chief executive of money-management behemoth BlackRock, assured me at the time.
He wasn’t alone. Top executives at Goldman Sach lined up in support of the one-term junior senator from Illinois with a tepid legislative record but an amazing stage presence that preached moderation and commonality.
They ignored his background as among the most progressive pols in the country; his private-sector “experience” as a community organizer.
When elected, Obama’s true political self soon emerged. He was a brilliant orator but he governed as a man of the left. He raised business taxes, ramped up regulations.
He basically destroyed Goldman Sachs’ business model despite its past support, short-circuiting its once-powerful trading business with new financial edicts.
The stock market hit a low during Obama’s first year, a hangover from the 2008 financial crisis, but with massive money-printing, the bull market was off and running.
You might say that was good for Wall Street, but not good enough to compensate for all the taxes and regulations, and soaring deficits, which is why a few in corporate America seemed to wizen up and support Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.
Power of incumbency
Too little and too late to overcome the power of incumbency. Obama won a second term, and there was nothing stopping his move to the left.
He unleashed his regulatory apparatus on the big banks (see the fines paid by JPMorgan over nebulous, 2008-related infractions), raised taxes and continued with his industrial policy, a forerunner of the lefty Green New Deal.
Then came Trump. The bankers liked some of what The Donald brought to the table, promises of lower taxes and less regulation. They couldn’t really get behind his gauche mannerisms and populist rhetoric, particularly on trade with their big new client, China Inc.
When Trump defeated their favorite for the 2016 presidency, Hillary Clinton (another Goldman pick), they hunkered down praying for a savior from MAGAism.
That savior was Joe Biden, the former Obama VP and a well-known quantity in corporate America since his home state (Biden was a longtime US senator from Delaware) is where disputes are adjudicated by the business-friendly Chancery court.
In the 2020 presidential election, Biden wooed the corporate types by talking like a moderate, but once elected also reverted to form: massive regulations, antitrust assaults, taxes and spending.
Stocks soared because of COVID-relief easy money mainly by the Fed, but the regulatory stranglehold imposed by Biden’s appointees to the administrative state have angered even the most ardent C-suite Dems, so much so that JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon recently touted the great economy under Trump.
That brings us to Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and whether corporate America will be fooled again by the cool vibe for these two ardent lefties being hyped by the mainstream media to gloss over their avowed records of progressivism, one that promises Bidenomics on steroids.
Given recent history, I am betting they will.
White Crypto Bros
In the spirit of “White Dudes for Harris” comes another cringe spinoff of intersectional vote mining, named “Crypto for Harris,” reports Fox Business’s Eleanor Terrett.
The Harris-centric crypto organization is playing catchup to Trump’s courting of the crypto crowd, the 40 million holders of digital coins who are largely one-issue voters, Terrett writes. It’s spearheaded by the likes of Mark Cuban, the Democrat tech entrepreneur and crypto enthusiast, and Anthony Scaramucci of SkyBridge Capital, who before he began hating on The Donald served as Trump’s communications director in 2017, albeit for only 11 disastrous days.
Both want to make sure Trump is denied a second term and they see an opening to peel away his lead with the crypto crowd the former president has been courting for months. Good luck with that.
First, with headliners like these, the group could just as easily be mocked as “Rich White Crypto Bros for Harris,” except its membership includes a few rich white women, Terrett reports.
Second, they will have to paper over Harris’s disastrous record as VP (border czar) and that she was part of an administration that nominally supervised Gary Gensler, the crypto-hating chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump recently vowed that in a second term he’d fire Gensler, who has launched a costly regulatory crackdown on the $2 trillion industry.
As Cameron Winklevoss, half of the famous Winklevoss twins and co-founder of crypto exchange Gemini, tweeted: “Kamala Harris, please don’t bother unless you are prepared to take swift, bold and concrete action. You can’t burn bridges for four years and expect to rebuild them with words alone.”
Charles Gasparino is the author of the forthcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America.”