It didn’t take long during Thursday’s Democratic debate for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to unload on Wall Street, denouncing the financial industry’s failings and sparring over who would be tougher on regulating big banks. Sanders decried the “greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street,” while Clinton said “we can never let Wall Street wreck Main Street.”
Both comments drew enthusiastic applause from the Brooklyn audience, at a moment when populist politics are carrying the day in both parties. But in downtown Manhattan, among the working-class voters who spend their days alongside the vilified titans of Wall Street, a more complicated view prevails. These workers—at the restaurants, barbershops and coffee carts that surround high-flying financial firms—don’t see the menace depicted by politicians in both parties.
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