Obama Changes his Tone About Wall Street

Hmm, maybe the idea of turning his back on all that campaign money from hedge funds and banks is finally starting to change his thinking.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

It all comes down to the fact that almost no one on Main Street can effectively do Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein job. Just like these same people cannot hope to do A-Rods job. So these CEOs are paid in a way that is commensurate with their skills. If they weren't running their companies there is pretty good chance that they could set up their own Hedge Funds and make millions that way instead.

The whole idea that Dimon and Blankfein caused this mess is absurd. It was the unregulated multi-trillion dollar derivatives market that was most of the problem. You add to this the ratings agencies that were running up profits by giving liar loans an A+ rating and things get even worse. The people at fault were Democrat and Republican, Wall Street players, the home builders and that idiot on Main Street that signed that liar loan in the first place. So it is good to see Obama backing off the bankers at least a little bit.