The Abridged Obama vs Wall Street

Obama To Wall Street: Put. The. Coffee. Down.

Wall Street to Obama: Yeah, we'll get right on that. Meanwhile, how about you bring us our lattes?


If you need a slightly-longer round up of various opinions of Obama’s speech to Wall Street, "The Week" has one here:

“There was no cheering section” at President Obama’s speech to Wall Street Monday, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. The gathered “top echelon” of Wall Street bankers met the speech with “grimacing” faces and one round of applause. The best you can say is that the executives were “politely supportive” of Obama’s main points—the need for reform, new federal authority to wind down “too big to fail” banks, and a “systemic regulator.”
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Appealing to Wall Street’s “better angels” is “shockingly naïve,” said Arianna Huffington in The Huffington Post, when financial lobbyists are working overtime to gut any real reform. Obama said all the right things in his “heartfelt, well-intentioned” speech, but he’s “utterly misreading the opponents of reform,” and the opponents are winning.

"And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will request your neutrality and he who is your friend will ask you to declare yourself by taking up arms. And irresolute princes, in order to avoid present dangers, follow the neutral road most of the time, and most of the time they are ruined."

-- Niccolo Machiavelli