Bought and Paid For by Charles Gasparino Read Free Book Online Page A

investment bankers—including those at the secret meeting—know, pushing banks to make terrible loans is just one way Wall Street has made a fortune off Washington. While a fiscally conservative McCain administration would presumably be looking to lower spending, which would mean less borrowing and less money for Wall Street, Obama would not. To take just one example, which was no doubt in the minds of those in the room, if Obama became president, he would likely support a “green agenda” that would mean potentially tens of billions of dollars in federal money and incentives going into new businesses like solar and wind power, not to mention renewable energy and ethanol (as General Electric and its Republican-turned-Obama-supporting CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, would soon discover). While Big Business feasted off this largesse, the bankers would get a piece of the new action as well, namely the fees for bringing those companies public and the high stock prices for their direct investments in the nascent industries. But the green agenda was just part of it.
    This is, of course, exactly the opposite of the assumption made by most Americans, thanks in large part to the left-leaning media, that because investment bankers are rich, they must favor Republicans because, by definition, Republicans favor lower taxes on the wealthy and on big business. And while, of course, no one likes high taxes, what’s more important than the tax rate is how much income you make in the first place: paying 30 percent of your money in taxes if you make a million dollars is better than paying a 20 percent tax rate on an income of only half a million.
    In fact, a year after the secret meeting, in June 2008, as the markets were getting skittish and candidate Obama’s economic team was fanning out trying to cool the fires, Greg Fleming said to me as the inevitability of a Democratic president and his high-tax agenda became clear, “We’re all going to have to accept taxes are going up but we can live with it.”
    Fleming was not alone. He and his rich Wall Street brethren could live with those higher taxes under an Obama administration because they’d still make as much or more money under Obama than they would have under McCain or another Republican.
    After all, it was under a Democratic administration (with the help of prominent Republicans like free-marketer Senator Phil Gramm) that the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented certain kinds of banks from combining, was repealed, allowing the big firms to swiftly grow in size.
    While many of these characteristics (love of Big Government, “green agenda,” etc.) are hardly unique to Barack Obama among Democrats, he alone seemed to have the complete combination of characteristics the bankers were looking to purchase. And make no mistake about it, “purchase” is the right word to use: These men, used to evaluating the characteristics of multibillion-dollar deals, approach politics as they do any other trade, and Obama, with his perceived probusiness outlook on life and charisma, not to mention his seeming moderateness and his close ties to Wall Streeters such as Gallogly and those who for years had been perfecting the Wall Street-Big Government link, seemed like a sure bet.

    Knowing all this, it’s no wonder Gallogly was able to convince his high-powered colleagues to meet this fresh-faced candidate from Illinois as they sipped some wine at a Washington hot spot.
    To be sure, all the attendees were looking for a president who represented something new, even if they each came with their own agenda. In the case of Larry Fink, the CEO of what would become the largest money-management firm in the world, BlackRock, it was a quest for something other than the sleaze of the Clintons and for someone who could play favorably internationally, where the Republican brand was toxic (Fink did much of his business overseas as a money manager for large