MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Going Too Easy On Wall Street,” Ellis Henican Column, amNewYork, April 23, 2010
“Oh, yeah?” Wall Street said with a shrug to Barack Obama.
“That’s all you got?”
Yes, that was all the Regulator in Chief had — a small rebuke wrapped in an olive branch, the stock-market equivalent of, “I’d rather you stop doing the really sleazy stuff, but don’t worry you’ll still have plenty of opportunity to make gobs of money off the hopes of average folks!”
Whew!
Only in America can a man who earns $400,000 a year frighten and then calm a roomful of Wall Street titans who earn 10 and 100 times that — both in the same day.
The morning started bleakly. The financial news was all about how screwed-up the Greek economy is and how nervous Wall Streeters were about what the president might say.
Greece stayed a mess. But Obama was far more a hugger than a scold. “Unless your business model relies on bilking people,” he told the New York money people who sat before him at Cooper Union, “there’s little to fear from these new rules.”
Bilking people? They all knew he couldn’t possibly be talking about them.
Many of Wall Street’s biggest names were there, people who’d played major roles in creating the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
They included Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and COO Gary Cohn, along with top managers from Credit Suisse, Bank of America, Barclays, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase.
But with the president’s gentle invitation — “join us instead of fighting
us”— the traders and their bosses erupted in their own special victory dance. A market that had spent the morning solidly in negative territory did a nice about-face, sending the financial-services shares skyward.
Wells Fargo, up. Bank of America, up. Even Goldman Sachs was up, up, up. So ignore all the wounded quotes you’re reading from these Wall Street people. They’re not mad at all. They’re voting “buy” on their Bloomberg terminals.
By the time the day was done and the president had left Cooper Square, the market managed to recoup every nickel it had lost since the feds sued Goldman for fraud two weeks ago.
That was all he had.
E-mail ellis@henican.com.
Follow him at twitter.com/henican.
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