Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Obviously, back in 2008, when Wall Street was dumping millions into the campaign of Barack Obama, it didn’t ask for a prenup. The honeymoon went smoothly for a while, with Wall Street quite content to have slap-on-the-wrist Mary Schapiro sitting atop the SEC and Tim Geithner, the former sugar-daddy of bailouts from the New York Fed, holding down the fort at the U.S. Treasury.
But then came Dodd-Frank, the Volcker Rule, regulation of derivatives, quips about fat-cats from the President and a big-money divorce. Today, reports the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street and financial services firms have given a tepid $12 million to President Obama’s campaign versus the $43 million they gave in 2008. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has received over $24 million from the slimmed down fat-cats in this election cycle.
During the first presidential debate, Romney had this to say about the passage of Dodd-Frank: “It’s the biggest kiss that’s been given to New York banks I’ve ever seen.”
Romney obviously knows less about kisses than he does about the humane methods of transporting a dog from point A to point B. The biggest smooch in history to Wall Street was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act under the Clinton administration, allowing the New York firms to get their hands on a huge chunk of the Nation’s insured deposits. The trillions pumped into those very same banks in bailout loans of less than 1 percent interest by Tim Geithner’s New York Fed also hit a new high-water mark in the kiss category.
Defending the enactment of Dodd-Frank, President Obama said: “Does anyone out there think that the big problem we had is that there was too much oversight and regulation of Wall Street?”
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