Wall Street’s old nemesis on Capitol Hill is back — and she’s looking scarier than ever.
Elizabeth Warren is known as the firebrand senator from Massachusetts among her lefty fans, many of them in the media. She’s also known as an obstructionist troll by her detractors, who include just about anyone who works in corporate America.
Warren has always been a royal pain in the ass for bankers and wealth creators in general. Jamie Dimon seeks common ground with just about everyone — even socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who this past spring affably sat and discussed public-private partnerships with the JPMorgan CEO.
But Dimon finds it impossible to find any common ground — much less friendly dialogue — with Warren, I am told. And Warren likes it that way, banking sources reckon.
“What does she bring to the table other than class warfare bull- s–t,” is how one CEO put it to me. “She stands for nothing other than attacking success.”
Warren would describe her role differently. I’ve covered her for years, including when she was an academic, a law professor at Harvard, where she appeared on financial TV discussions with me at my then-employer CNBC debating the 2008 financial crisis.
Same old tune
I think I’m on solid ground surmising that Warren really “believes her own bulls–t,” as my old man would have put it. She’s a full-on class warrior and she hasn’t changed her tune. That’s whether she’s in the minority or now, once again, in the majority and the all-but-certain head of the powerful Senate Banking Committee.
Warren may not think Dimon is inherently evil, but she does seem to believe the banking business is evil and inherently so. Banks in her mind are like mob bookies; they exist to skim an outrageous vig from clueless consumers. For that reason, bank bosses need to be handcuffed with massive regulations and hounded like criminals with endless hearings.
Indeed, Dimon and his fellow travelers in the C-suites must be publicly bullied and vilified to no end, according to Warren. Otherwise, customers might forget they’re getting ripped off when depositing money in their checking accounts or using a credit card.
That’s what I know every banker in America is bracing for — even those like Dimon or Brian Moynihan of BofA with more progressive politics. They know they won’t escape the wrath of Warren.
Yes, there’s something admirable about a politician who believes in what she says. See how longtime lefties James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed essentially lied and campaigned like born-again free-marketeers on their way to winning Senate seats in Texas and Michigan.
There’s none of that with Warren. My problem is that so much of what she believes falls into that aforementioned “bulls–t” category.
People aren’t getting ripped off when they decide to charge everything on a credit card and pay some outrageous fee; they’re getting a bunch of money with no questions asked, so of course the fees are high.
Poor alternative
You get what you pay for, and the alternative that Warren proposes would mean that these people won’t get credit cards for the obvious reason that they’re not the best credit risks.
Do banks really discriminate against poor people — charging them higher rates for various things — because they’re evil, or because poor people have a higher likelihood of default?
She would like to end all crypto as if its underlying blockchain technology exists only to facilitate money laundering, not making transactions cheaper for the consumer she says she cares about. Or that it does no good other than making the Trump family rich, while everyone else in crypto gets poor, which is far from the truth.
I can go on and on about her nonsense. Take executive pay — does capping the millions CEOs make really lead to better lives for the working class? Is Elon Musk really evil because he makes a lot of money leading revolutionary businesses — an EV company among them — or just a smart guy making money while making the world better?
You know the answers.
All of the above now looms as a list of worries for Wall Street just got longer: On top of a likely throttling of the AI investment boom, American industry is poised to face higher interest rates and commies moving into governors mansions and congressional seats alike.
But in what promises to be a morass of left-wing ideological meddling over the next two years, Warren poses a particular threat — a massively counterproductive member of Congress in a sea of counterproductivity.
She is also now very powerful. Get ready, bankers, to feel her wrath.
