Bloomberg takes a look at the various players in the donor class who have contributed big bucks to Hillary Clinton or her Super PACs, and they discover some interesting tidbits. For example, Clinton has talked a lot about the great risk posed by the shadow banking industry and she’s used her promise to crack down on it as a counter to Bernie Sanders’ call to break up the big institutional banks. Yet, she’s getting quite a haul of cash from the very people she’s threatening with more oversight and regulation.
Hedge funds, private equity and insurance executives, who could face greater oversight under the plan, have given a combined $24.9 million to Clinton and the super-PACs supporting her, a Bloomberg review of campaign finance records shows…
…Hedge fund operators have contributed $17.7 million toward electing Clinton, including a $7 million donation by George Soros to Priorities USA Action, the main super-PAC supporting Clinton, and $7.5 million from James Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies. Both Soros and Simons are long-time supporters of Democratic candidates and liberal causes, and each donated to Clinton’s 2008 presidential and 2006 Senate campaign.
Executives of the Blackstone Group LP contributed $151,000, while employees of Centerbridge Partners gave $140,000 and Oaktree Capital Management LLC, $72,000. Private equity firms have donated $6.7 million, while insurers, excluding those in the healthcare field, have contributed $515,000.
The 20 largest banks by assets — a group that includes JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group — contributed $1.1 million.
To be sure, executives from these same industries lavished significantly more money on Jeb Bush, so Clinton was initially treated as more of a hedge than a champion.
It appears now, though, that she’s probably preferred by a majority of these folks over Donald Trump.
Now, one way of looking at this is that she owes something back to these benefactors and she surely won’t go too hard on them. Why would they fund someone who would turn around and hurt their bottom line? And wouldn’t she want them to give again when the time comes to run for reelection?
That’s the conventional way of looking at this, and it could very well be completely accurate. But it would contradict what she’s been saying on the campaign trail and require her to shelve the plans she’s developed for dealing with the shadow banking industry.
A different way of looking at this is that she’s lucked out in a variety of ways and now has Wall Street by the short and curlies.
Think about it.
When she was nearly done serving as First Lady and was looking for a Senate seat, it was dumb luck that Patrick Moynihan of New York had made the decision to retire. She could have been the senator from Illinois or even, maybe, Arkansas. But it was New York that offered the opportunity to serve in the Senate, and that gave her the chance to build relationships and trust with Wall Street.
From that experience, she gained an advantage because Wall Street didn’t treat her as a pariah of a presidential candidate who must be destroyed at all costs. They treated her as a reasonable and acceptable second choice whose main downside wasn’t anything personal but more that the Republicans are always offering a better deal.
Wall Street can be the most lethal of adversaries, and neutering them is a boon to any Democratic contender. Their money doesn’t hurt, either.
The next piece of luck was her timing. Because Wall Street’s champion, Jeb Bush, was a complete non-starter with the Republican base in this election cycle, she went from having a massively funded opponent to having one whose operation is basically a couple of floors in Trump Tower and little else.
And that opponent was the last piece of luck, because his hostility to immigration and free trade is so pronounced that he’s a complete non-starter on Wall Street. Whatever Clinton does will look lenient by comparison. And that’s not even getting into rational assessments of their understanding of the financial sector, the prospect of trade wars, and other insanity offered by Trump that is anathema to all thinking people.
The result is that Clinton can do pretty much whatever she wants to Wall Street and still have their support, at least in the near term. She’ll still have to worry about 2020 should the Republican base suddenly decide that they want another Romney or Bush.
I can’t predict what Clinton will do, but she sure has a much freer hand to do what she thinks is right than most people in her position ever enjoy.
It’s true, she’s taken a lot of money from the people she promises to rein in, but it looks like she owns them a lot more than they own her.
It’d be nice if she acts that way once in office.
Booman–You can’t possibly think you’re going to persuade the Hillary bashers here. The canonical position taken on these pages has been “she’s a liar and a Wall Street whore who will flip as soon as elected and do the banksters’ bidding”.
Is it possible that these people are as wrong about this as they’ve been in every other prediction they’ve made this year on this blog?
It’s really up to Hillary, is my point. She’s in the catbird seat.
No one ever went broke betting on Hillary Clinton’s lack of ethics.
Can we invoke something akin to Godwin’s Law here? Any discussion of Hillary Clinton invariably comes around to her lack of ethics/whoring for Wall Street/Debbie Wasserman Schulz.
I thought it always came down to the neoliberals selling us out to the plutocrats and oligarchs.
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I don’t think Godwin’s Law applies if the subject under discussion is actually the Nazi Party.
We’re talking about a politician who has strategically hugged wealth and power her entire career, whose one great insight was that she could claw her way to the top more quickly and easily through the ruins of the Democratic party than the rigid and oversubscribed tiers of caste in her native Republican party.
A person, incidentally, who wrote a thesis on Saul Alinsky then declined an internship with him for the sake of a better paying law career. A politician who has made her own struggles the party’s struggles rather than the other way around, who has carved out a new money dynasty for herself and married her sole heir to the very vampire squid whom has impoverished many of her constituents.
Who needs to mention whoring and lack of integrity in that context? Res ipsa loquitur.
This is soooo GD awesome I had to cut and paste it.
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Saying that something is an ‘canonical position’ isn’t an argument.
Clinton is a politician, and she’s a small-c conservative. That’s her primary selling point; she vows to conserve what gains the liberal movement have made, and even when she talks about improving the system, she’s clearly intent upon conserving it. And that’s good! We need that. Although I personally would prefer that a politician who is experienced, intelligent, rational, tolerant, humane, and fundamentally conservative be the leader of the right-side party.
Maybe Boo is right. Maybe accepting $25 million from shadow bankers, and presumably counting on them for millions more in her reelection fight, means that Clinton owns them. It’s a novel understanding of how purchasing works, but who knows? Maybe she’ll use that lucrative relationship to push through even stricter regulations.
And maybe Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is accepting all those donations from payday lenders to help her rein in payday lenders.
But what you’re saying is only an argument.
In other words, it’s not responsive to what I wrote.
Yes, the conventional way of looking at this is that you take money and you represent that money’s interests.
What’s unconventional is the situation she finds herself in, which is one in which Wall Street is out of alternatives. That doesn’t normally happen, and it gives her a freer hand than is normally the case.
It’s not only the GOP that placed the wrong bets here.
There is every likelihood that she won’t go four yrs without a financial shock. What has she ever DONE that persuades you she would not follow conventional economic advice which is totally Wall Street centric? Obama did.
It’s hard to respond substantively beyond ‘I guess we’ll find out.’ Maybe I’m missing part of your argument. Two questions:
Eleventy dimensional chess?
Well, it certainly is shaping up to be an unconventional election cycle, and hardly in a positive sense. My modest hopes are that HRC does follow through on some economic reforms (however modest those may turn out to be) and that Sanders’ supporters use this cycle as an opportunity to make their presence felt in the down-ballot races (which are crucial, but often ignored) and in their local party organizations, many of which in red states especially could use some help. If it’s a movement they want, that’s one way to build it. As to whether HRC actually finds herself with leverage over Wall Street, or if she’s motivated to use such leverage assuming it exists, is something of an unknown I suppose. Assuming she wins in November (and I still expect that as the likely outcome, but one not to be taken for granted) we’ll find out fairly quickly. I still like the prospects of her in the Oval Office far more than I do Trump.
I wasn’t trying to make an argument, rather to render in a few words the common position I read here among Hillary Clinton critics. (I’m one myself, I just don’t frame my criticisms that way.)
And right on cue….
Wait an hour…..the words ‘oligarch’ and ‘neoliberal’ have not been used yet.
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and meaningful terms. Abusing them (and what useful term doesn’t get abused by propagandists and/or demagogues?) doesn’t change that.
Better to keep any denigrating focus on examples of actual such abuse than to engage in blanket snark at any/all employment of perfectly useful and meaningful (when not being abused) terms. To do otherwise is to concede victory to the propagandists/demagogues.
imo
ymmv
I guess they believe she will transform into their worst nightmare…
You forgot “neocon”. Hillary Clinton is both a neoliberal and a neocon.
Also,
The Clinton machine corruption is EVERYWHERE, including Las Vegas and the Far Eastern districts of Kentucky, they are super geniuses at the manipulation of the political process, yet she might not be savvy enough to remove Warren from the senate by offering her the VP spot.
Offing the VP spot is proof of Machiavellian corruption, not offering the spot is proof of being not smart enough to be Machiavellian!
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You’re reaching here.
We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t try and fire Cordray as head of the Consumer Protection Bureau.
Yeah, that’s the ticket, Boo.
(That was snark.)
They own her. And she likes being owned by the rich.
Give it up, Bob. He’s gone full Markos. The populist stuff is just to con the marks into voting (D) so that people like the Clintons can make their 30 million pieces of silver.
Booman told us that he voted for Sanders in the Pennsylvania primary, but I guess you’ve got an explanation for how either he was lying, or that vote was part of an elaborate scheme to ratfuck the true Sanders supporters.
bernie took money from hillarypac so i guess she owns him now. or he owns her. one of those.
You are wishing for unicorns from Hillary? That she upend her core belief that free markets are better than government at producing fair outcomes?
Careful there. You are getting close to that neo liberal word.
Tell the children to cover their eyes.
Naw, he was describing her actions, not trying to define them.
Even if HRC wasn’t lying about shadow banking (and Barack Obama lied about NAFTA–it’s something candidates just do, right?) and ISN’T owned by Wall Street, Wall Street’s gratitude will last only until the votes are in on the first Tuesday in November. Then it’ll be screaming about how whatever she does will wreck the economy and supporting any opponents to any incremental reforms.
Why do I think this? Barack Obama saved them from pitchforks and Sarah Palin and gave them a blank check on a bailout and what happened? Enemies to the hilt. The tiniest reforms became Lenin and Mao. The Tea Party they happily embraced. As soon as Trump is gone, if he’s gone, they’ll start funding Paul Ryan or whoever.
And the problem with forming cozy relationships with wall street is they become your friends. Even if you don’t do what they tell you, but you think “Do I really want to hurt my friends? Do my friends deserve to have this money taken away from them?” the personal relationship basically becomes a blind spot. Your horizons are limited just by not seeing them in dispassionate terms.
And the problem with forming cozy relationships with wall street is they become your friends. Even if you don’t do what they tell you, but you think “Do I really want to hurt my friends? Do my friends deserve to have this money taken away from them?” the personal relationship basically becomes a blind spot. Your horizons are limited just by not seeing them in dispassionate terms.
So you’re saying that corruption isn’t necessarily about handing over sacks of money in exchange for votes and leverage, but about forming relationships and seeing problems through the eyes of plutocrats? Perish the thought!
Meanwhile:
Well I got to say, Bernie’s doings sound more fun and more like me.
As a politician you are supposed to do what’s best for everyone. But if the only people you see as equals/friends are plutocrats who don’t really need help then your views are going to become quite skewed because often what’s good for the plutocrats is bad for everyone else.
It’s basically buying into a chummy elite club but our elites have proven manifestly incapable.
But if the only people you see as equals/friends are plutocrats who don’t really need help then your views are going to become quite skewed because often what’s good for the plutocrats is bad for everyone else.
It’s basically buying into a chummy elite club but our elites have proven manifestly incapable.
You know who admitted, in his book, that the more he hung out with the elites/plutocrats the more he thought like them? Some tall guy with funny ears. Crap, I can’t remember his name right now …….
Haha, really?
In his own words:
link
Thanks for posting that as it was exactly what I was talking about. People either forget, or don’t want to remember he wrote that.
Who lived it.
UH, he’s an introvert who can’t stand crowds. I know someone like that. i see him every time I look in a mirror.
You write:
“And that opponent was the last piece of luck, because his hostility to immigration and free trade is so pronounced that he’s a complete non-starter on Wall Street.”
I must ask you, Booman…why do you think that Wall Street is so pro-immigration and so-called “free trade?”
Could it be because:
The more immigrants the more cheap labor?
and
The more “free-trade”…in the Wall Streetian sense, trade with other countries that have a much lower wage situation than does the U.S….the more profit for the .01 percenters?
I have posted the following numerous times here. I will continue doing so until its basic truth strikes home.
There it is…way back in 1991!!! Deal wid it.
Hillary has. She’s cut a deal with it.
AG
Ah yes, Ross Perot. The man who always said, “It’s really very simple.”
Whenever I hear someone say “It’s really very simple,” I grab my hat, head for the door, and look for the first train out of town.
Ross Perot. What an oracle.
Wasn’t he also in the habit of twanging away about how “we’ll get under the hood and fix that thang”?
Are you aware that a massive non-personing mass media effort…the reverberations of which are still echoing from knee-jerk jerks like you and others here on Booman…plus some serious threats to his family rode him out of the race before he even got to try to “get under the hood and fix that thang”?
Are you?
The .01% certainly didn’t want to see him in office, just as they haven’t wanted to see anyone else over the last…oh, date it from JFK’s murder, say 50+ years who threatened the PermaGov hierarchy in any way whatsoever.
Physical assassination, character assassination, vote fraud, threats…they do whatever is necessary to maintain control.
WTFU.
AG
Is that so?
Did you read the excerpt?
Where was he wrong?
it should be “very simple” for you to answer, provided of course that you haven’t haven’t already grabbed your hat, headed for the door and taken whatever trains out of town that are still easily available in this thoroughly degraded infrastructure.
AG
Two things:
McDonald’s too
Item 2 is aspirational. There is no concrete evidence of that. Only the notion that Wall Street should realize that.
Another “Trust me” in an era of massively failed trust.
Of course, aspirational. i just say to be aware of the possibility. There is a lot of corporate folks, in particular Silicon Valley, that has no use for bigotry and hatred and discrimination. They see that as a threat to the bottom line, to the ability to recruit good people, etc. And, as I said, they may be seeing the light about raising some wages.
Yeah, those guys are committed to women and minorities. No bigotry and discrimination there!
Are you unable to see the positive side of anyone? Isn’t it a drag to live life so cynical?
Look at Uber or AirBnB who make their money by shoving costs and risks onto individuals while skirting the laws. Deluding yourself into thinking these companies are somehow kinder, gentler corporations is dangerous and counterproductive.
Actually it is kind of a drag but that’s just how I’m made and it’s dealing with life how it actually is. I mean hell wasn’t there some sort of research suggesting progress happens because of pessimists not optimists?
I actually have a lot of problem with the Uber and Air BNB model for the reasons you cite. Millennials love them, though. Why is that? They can make some cash, are their own boss (in a way), choose their hours. I guess that’s why. But they also hurt people who saved up for a taxi medalion and owe money on it still. It all feels anti-union to me. So, as is usually the case with me, I see two sides and come away with mixed feelings about these types of companies.
I applaud those CEOs (and other organizations) that have sent strong messages to North Carolina re: HB2. And those who challenged Arizona on it’s “papers please” laws. Some individuals and the corporations they lead try to have a social conscience. To write them off just because they are corporations is not to view the reality that there are corporations.
Don’t forget to think about the corporations whose attitudes oppose yours, socially. Maybe Hobby Lobby? I’d never go in one. I won’t eat at Chik-fil-a either. I bet you’re not crazy about Monsanto. I let my money talk for me. So do corporations, for our good or bad. And, I think, it’s helpful to see that.
Some of us aren’t as ill-informed about how women and minorities fare on Wall St. and Silicon Valley. Acknowledging reality isn’t cynical except to those that wear anti-reality goggles.
Two guys get the same diagnosis of a terminal illness. One flings himself off a freeway overpass. The other quits his job so he can travel and spend time with his grandchildren. Both were responding to reality.
What a non-responsive and silly response to my comment. But I’ll play along —
The WallSt/Silicon Valley guy with cancer can take off all the time he needs, get all the medical treatment he wants, and his family will remain privileged throughout their lives. The other guy struggles to get enough hours to earn $400/week. Can’t afford to take any time off and can’t afford the health insurance deductibles and co-pays. His life insurance will take care of his family if he flings himself off a freeway overpass.
I thought most policies didn’t pay out fot suicides.
I know mine doesn’t.
Should only exclude death by suicide during the first two years the policy is in force.
I’ll have to look at the fine print again on my life insurance. Not that I am at any risk, of course. Quite the opposite, actually. Still insurance is such an amusing racket. Life insurance certainly has its quirks, as does health insurance (better now than back in the bad old days, but still it has a long way to go before it becomes anywhere remotely humane). While dealing with a medical crisis in my family, I did get to read some of the health insurance policy fine print, and it’s amazing what an attempted suicide will do to your coverage (not anything affecting us, but was certainly eye opening to be aware of). If someone wasn’t suicidal already, the thought of a medical-bill induced bankruptcy because the insurance does not cover injuries and such due to a suicide attempt would almost certainly drive one over the edge.
Common misunderstanding.
VA life insurance policies don’t even have the standard two year exception for suicides. However, the VA has looked at this and finds no evidence that the life insurance have contributed to suicides.
Hillbilly healthcare in these United States.
Let’s dispense with one thing at least, the thought leaders of Wall Street are cunning but not really very smart. The time-frame for the maturation of most deals is days or weeks, maybe months. ‘Strategy’ to them is thinking ahead the next few quarters.
These are short-term thinkers living in an insular bubble propagated by their wealth and access to influence. They think they are smart because they are rich. That’s it, the plumbed depth of their philosophy. Everything else is just spin.
I think you got the object and subject of the sentence mixed up?
The answer is clearly yes, because something something Goldman Sachs gave her speaking fees, something something The Clinton Global Initiative.
Would be interesting to know what those parameters are and how wrong and in what way wrong to be outside of them.
Perhaps get MX to build a wall along out mutual border and pay for it?
But there’s a lot of room between such outrageous notions and less crazy proposals.
For all the heat you give Sanders supporters for their delusions on how things work…this one really takes the cake.
We all have issues on which we are less than objective or realistic. You might want to remember this post the next time you rip into someone for having an outlandish idea or belief.
Booman voted for Sanders.
Not relevant my point.
His voting for Sanders has nothing to do with the tone and attitude he has taken against those who have been passionate about Sanders and his policy ideas.
Where Sanders is concerned, Booman has less passion than a corpse.
It seems that Robert Kagan (Mr. Victoria Nuland) has an op-ed today bashing Trump and essentially endorsing Hillary Clinton. That is not unexpected at all.
On Wall Street and “short and curlies” (interesting metaphor), you’re whistling past the graveyard.
I would be curious as to how Daniel Patrick Monyihan, who stuck the knife in Hillarycare, arrived at his decision to resign just in time to provide a location near Wall Street as a parking place for the Clintons. There was some interesting financial deregulation during the latter years of the Clinton administration that has come back to haunt us And I admit that over the past 12 years online I’ve become more cranky and cynical, but I now smell some hidden history in that “luck”.
Another interesting point would be which part of Wall Street is endorsing Clinton. The Rubin-Dimon bunch has worked the Democratic Party side of the duopoly for some time. So has Pete Peterson. And some others. Are there any GOP crossovers from Wall Street showing up in supporting Clinton? If not, it’s just establishment Democrat business as usual. With the usual quid-pro-quo’s carefully vetted by very good lobbyist lawyers.
She will not break up too-big-to-fail banks. That means that she buys into the notion that FDIC insured funds can silently underwrite “creative finance” casion betting with the US taxpayer implicitly still on the hook. She just is betting that the FIRE sector will not create another crisis during her campaign or during her Presidency. Her whole staff would do well to read David Dayen’s Chain of Title and stat before they hit the general election campaign trail.
I don’t see what power Hilary Clinton has over Wall Street without a major tranformation of Congress and some really tough Cordray-type appointment to financial regulatory positions.
And frankly, I see the offer of the VP slot to Elizabeth Warren as a way of getting Warren out of the position where she most threatens the status quo on Wall Street.
Also, without a Congressional transformation and appointments of some tough regulators and a new set of staff lawyers, I don’t see that Bernie Sanders has Wall Street by the “short and curlies” either.
If Trump does, he would have to persuade the GOP Congressional caucus and would be motivated primarily by spite, which means different things to different folks on Wall Street. But Trump is more likely to open the doors to the casino to allow the gray-market to become legit.
Perhaps I’m not nearly cynical enough, but would guess that D. Moynihan’s decision not to seek reelection in 2000 (announced in November 1998) was that of a 72 year old man that had interests outside of DC legislation that he wanted time to pursue and who had lost his younger brother to cancer in 1996.
However, you’re correct that luck on the Democratic side had nothing to do with the rest of it.
Those competitors for the nomination quickly disappeared. Gramm-Leach-Bliley was signed into law on 11/12/99. The CFMA wasn’t signed until 12/21/00; so, was that a big thank you? (The prior telecom dereg and capital gains tax cuts were also appreciated by Wall St.)
The “dumb luck” was Guiliani’s mistress, and like Mark Sanford, he was willing to take the political hit to be with the mistress and dump the wife. So, HRC ended up with no competition in the primary or general.
Warren as HRC’s VP would be to silence Warren. Not sure HRC is savvy enough to make such a move (and even if she were, she couldn’t handle having a co-star other than Bill), but suspect Warren (unlike many of her supporters) is too sharp to fall for such a ploy.
One rarely sees historical and predictive analysis juxtaposed so neatly and with such apparent insight. Agree on both counts.
I sure hope and even expect Warren will not fall for that warm can of spit. Warren may at least be acquainted with the causes of the crash and would be more helpful in congress if they start the merry go round up again.
Conservative author PJ O’Rourke said when he endorsed Clinton, “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.” I disagree with him, but it’s an interesting take.
ot:
State passes anti-abortion bill described as `insane’
05/19/16 03:41 PM
By Steve Benen
Republican policymakers in Oklahoma are aware of the fact that they cannot simply ban all abortions. The Supreme Court has already considered flat prohibitions and deemed them unconstitutional.
The article that there’s one physician in the state Senate, Republican Ervin Yen, who characterized the legislation as an “insane” measure that would invariably face a court challenge.
Can they Appeals Court shop and find a friendly judge to give them a positive ruling? Then it can be hung up while waiting a new SC member…