This is what you do after you lose and election in a rock solid Blue State (Massachusetts). Go on the offensive against evil banks.
When Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and White House adviser Valerie Jarrett hosted a private dinner with the leaders of six banks to discuss financial regulation on Jan. 20, the bankers soon changed the subject. The president needed to stop demonizing Wall Street, they told Jarrett, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
What the executives, including Brian Moynihan, the chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp., and Robert Kelly, the chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon Corp., didn’t know was that President Barack Obama, who had proposed a new tax on the biggest banks six days earlier, was about to strike again.
After leaving the meeting around 9 p.m., the executives learned that Obama would ask Congress the next day to ban commercial banks from running proprietary trading operations, owning hedge funds, and rapidly increasing market share. In his remarks, Obama indicated his willingness to go to the mat with the industry: “So if these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have.”
Industry officials said they were stunned. “We did not know it was coming, that’s for sure,” said Scott Talbott, a lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents large banks and insurance companies and whose chairman, Richard Davis, the CEO of U.S. Bancorp, also attended the dinner.
President Obama continues his populist rhetoric as a political move to regain credibility. Obama’s proposed bank tax bill has nothing to do with “fixing” the banks or raising revenues. It has everything to do with politics. So again, he talks bipartisanship, had nice dinners with bankers, and does something else. My gut tells me voter anger against banks will fade and the president will be back to justifying his failed policies.
