Balanced somewhere on the scale between sympathy and exasperation about the Occupy Wall Street movement, many New York bankers and financiers say the protesters have a point, but are missing the mark.
“I don’t really understand what message they’re trying to convey,” Rockwell Global Capital chief strategist Peter Cardillo said. “They are just creating havoc and interfering with people trying to work.”
Thousands of protesters have descended on New York’s financial district in the past two months, fueling a resistance effort that galvanized into a worldwide people-power movement slamming corporate greed, growing income disparities and multinationals they say control the puppet strings of an unfair global economy.
Some who earn a living on Wall Street and in the surrounding canyons of lower Manhattan are more sympathetic toward the protesters who have been organizing speaker forums and gaining celebrity support as they denounce what they see as inequalities fostered by the richest 1 percent in the country.
“Time after time, there were ways in which the banks were taking enormous risks ... only to be saved by the American taxpayer,” Meeschaert New York director Gregori Volokhine said.
A trading manager at a major Wall Street bank, who identified himself as Jack, rued the creation of huge amounts of debt “by encouraging people to buy things they couldn’t afford, especially real estate.”
Most economic analysts say plummeting home prices following a boom in the housing market helped trigger the 2008-2009 financial crisis, which led to billions of US dollars in losses on mortgage-backed securities and the bailouts of US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The bosses of some major US banks, prime targets of the Occupy Wall Street movement, have taken the appeasement tack in public.
Citigroup chief executive Vikram Pandit told a press conference that protester rage was “completely understandable.”
“The economic recovery is not what we all want it to be,” Pandit said, as US President Barack Obama’s administration battles an unemployment rate that has remained at or above 9 percent for most of this year.
“Trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the US, and ... it’s Wall Street’s job to reach out to Main Street and rebuild that trust,” Pandit added.
Pandit’s counterpart at JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, also believed that large financial institutions left Americans in the lurch, even if he urged people not to tar all banks or politicians with the same brush.
“In general, these big institutions of America let them down,” he said.
However, the majority of sector employees queried said Occupy Wall Street’s targets were misplaced.
For them, it is not the financial industry that is responsible for the crisis, although many said that the US mortgage sector prompted a global credit crunch through risky financial products sold by the big Wall Street banks to financial institutions worldwide.
“To blame Goldman Sachs for the 9.1 percent unemployment rate doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Marblehead Asset Management strategist Mace Blicksilver said.
“Wall Street created the structured financial products, but it was government policy [that was] encouraging buying houses,” Blicksilver said.
Plus, many traders “work 90 hours a week,” bringing in millions of US dollars in profits for their firms, and are often “some of the most accomplished academic people in the country,” he said.
Jack sought to cast the average Wall Street worker as a New York everyman.
Protesters “think that all bankers are rich,” Jack said.
Howver, 90 percent of employees in investment banks “make within US$300,000 gross a year,” he said.
On that salary and “with two kids at home, you don’t go to the Hamptons or buy a BMW,” Jack added.
Most believe that the protesters would do better to target regulators at the US Federal Reserve or other government agencies that they said encouraged unsustainable debt under the policies of promoting home ownership.
“They should have a big march like Martin Luther King [did] in the ‘60s,” Cardillo said.
An Occupy Wall Street delegation had just left the makeshift camp at New York’s Zucotti Park on Wednesday to walk to the US capital.
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