There are some things Anthony Scaramucci would like you to know about him, right up front.
Anthony Scaramucci speaking to President Obama.
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Speaking on the program "Investing in America," President Obama said people felt as if they had been "beat up on" by Wall Street.
He would like you to know that he did not grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth. That he went to public school and Tufts University. That when he was interviewed for a job at Goldman Sachs, he wore a polyester suit. (“I didn’t know any better.”) That he failed the bar exam after graduating from Harvard Law School. That he was eventually fired by Goldman Sachs (but was rehired by a different division). That despite these setbacks, he founded a firm — a fund of funds called SkyBridge Capital — that now employs 43 people, and has $7.4 billion under management. And that he’s not one of those retrograde Wall Street types who thinks all taxes are evil.
“I’m pro-gay marriage,” he said. “Pro-choice. Against the death penalty. I have no problem if the government raises my taxes.”
And one other thing. Anthony Scaramucci wants you to know that he really, really wishes he had phrased that question he asked President Obama a few weeks ago a little differently. “I wish I hadn’t used the word piñata,” he told me earlier this week. “I was trying to throw him a softball.”
Did you see that exchange between Mr. Scaramucci and Mr. Obama? Jon Stewart feasted on it. It took place a week ago Monday, during the president’s town hall meeting in Washington. After a little jocular back and forth — Mr. Scaramucci was at Harvard Law at the same time as Mr. Obama, and joked about having once fouled the president on the basketball court — he got to the point.
“I represent the Wall Street community,” he began, wearing a suit that was decidedly not polyester. “We have felt like a piñata. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re beating us with a stick but we certainly feel like we’ve been whacked with a stick.” After going on a bit about job growth and the “connection between Wall Street and Main Street,” he returned to his theme. “When are we going to stop whacking Wall Street like a piñata?”
In fact, Mr. Scaramucci had served up a softball question — just not the kind he had intended. The rap on Mr. Obama from most Wall Street executives these days is that he is antibusiness. Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, compared Mr. Obama’s approach to Wall Street as akin to Hitler invading Poland in 1939. (Mr. Schwarzman quickly apologized when the remark was made public.) The hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb turned his latest quarterly letter to his investors into an anti-Obama screed.
As Mr. Scaramucci later explained it, though, he wasn’t trying to pile on. He supports Mr. Obama and wants him to succeed, he said. Rather, he was trying to tee up a question that, he hoped, would give the president a chance to begin to heal Wall Street’s hurt. “I thought I was giving him an opportunity to say he is pro-business,” Mr. Scaramucci said.
Instead, Mr. Obama used Mr. Scaramucci’s question to whack him like, well, a piñata. In the span of just a few minutes, Mr. Obama mentioned billion-dollar hedge fund compensation, Mr. Schwarzman’s Hitler remark, the absurdity of a fund manager’s secretary paying a higher tax rate than his or her boss, and the fact that “most people on Main Street feel like they’ve been beat up on.” He was interrupted several times by applause. “He came at me with a baseball bat,” complained Mr. Scaramucci.
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When I went to see Mr. Scaramucci a few days later, my purpose was to get him to explain to me why it is that Wall Street feels so beleaguered. I’d been having a difficult time understanding it. Yes, the “fat cat” rhetoric can’t be much fun to listen to, but is it really any worse than the political rhetoric used against health insurance executives, or the big oil companies or the teachers’ unions? Hardly. In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt said of the financial industry executives, “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” Mr. Obama hasn’t said anything approaching that level of venom.
Nor have his deeds been as punitive as Roosevelt’s were. The big banks aren’t being broken up, the way they were in the 1930s. Bankers aren’t being hauled off to jail. No serious effort has been made to rein in executive compensation — or even to claw back millions of dollars in bonuses that were based on what turned out to be illusory profits. Most of the financial practices and products that brought us to the brink remain legal under the new Dodd-Frank legislation — though they will, finally, be regulated. All things considered, Wall Street has gotten off pretty easy.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Scaramucci didn’t see it that way. To his way of thinking, all of Wall Street was being blamed for the actions of a few bad apples. “You have 500 to 1,000 rogues on Wall Street,” he said. “They were the ones who did counterproductive things to the society. There were 25 guys at A.I.G. who blew up the whole company. It was a very small number. They were the devil on Wall Street. My assistant works on Wall Street. She’s not the devil. I just met with 50 brokers. They’re not the devil. When the president says ‘all these fat cats,’ he is hurting all of Wall Street.”
What about his old firm, Goldman Sachs? I asked. Didn’t they do things they shouldn’t have? “They probably did,” he replied, but then quickly reverted to his previous theory. “There are probably some bad people at Goldman,” he said. “But it would be very bad if the government took out Goldman Sachs. Goldman is the American dream factory. They can move people from the lower middle class to the ultra rich in one generation.” Therefore, he believed, Goldman should be praised, not scorned.
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