There is a story, which I have been unable to verify with the Google machine, (If someone has a source, please add to the comments) that when J.P. Morgan dining in his club when he was informed that President McKinley had died, which meant that Theodore Roosevelt would become President, and he was so upset that he vomited on the spot.
This may be apocryphal, but seeing as how Roosevelt's first trust busting success was against Morgan's Northern Securities Trust, he would have been well justified in feeling a bit disturbed at this development.
Well, The New Republic (aka Even the Liberal New Republic) has published an essay suggesting that Elizabeth Warren may be running for President in 2016, and that she would have a good chance of getting the nomination, something which should have Jamie Dimon looking like Linda Blair from the Exorcist:
We’re three years from the next presidential election, and Hillary Clinton is, once again, the inevitable Democratic nominee. ……
……
The last time Clinton ran, of course, the issue was Iraq and the gleaming new mug was Barack Obama’s. This time the debate will be about the power of America’s wealthiest. And, far more than with foreign policy, which most Democrats agreed on by 2008, this disagreement will cut to the very core of the party: what it stands for and who it represents.
……
All of this is deeply problematic for Hillary Clinton. As a student of public opinion, she clearly understands the direction her party is headed. As the head of an enterprise known as Clinton Inc. that requires vast sums of capital to function, she also realizes there are limits to how much she can alienate the lords of finance. For that matter, it’s not even clear Clinton would want to. “Many of her best friends, her intellectual brain trust [on economics], all come out of that world,” says a longtime Democratic operative who worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and then for Hillary in the White House. “She doesn’t have a problem on the fighting-for-working-class-folks side”—protecting Medicare and Social Security—“but it will be hard, really wrenching for her to be that populist on [finance] issues.”
Which brings us to the probable face of the insurgency. In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need several key assets. The candidate would almost certainly have to be a woman, given Democrats’ desire to make history again. She would have to amass huge piles of money with relatively little effort. Above all, she would have to awaken in Democratic voters an almost evangelical passion. As it happens, there is precisely such a person. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.
……
The article continues to note that reigning in Wall Street, reinforcing that going up against Wall Street, and Rubinomics is both good policy and
fantastically good politics, and I do not think that Hillary is in a position to do this.
Obviously, the somewhat tortured relationship between TNR and Hillary Clinton might have something to do with this, and I haven't seen any indications that Warren is gearing up for a Presidential run, as much as I would like her to.
Also, on further review, it appears that this might be cast as a not so subtle slam against Warren, something that Salon's examination of the subject is definitely not:
If asked, Americans of all political persuasions will say overwhelmingly that they prefer “tougher rules” for Wall Street. But what does that actually mean?
You can frame this conventionally: supporting regulators, punishing rules violators, mopping up 2008-style disasters to limit the damage and attempting to prevent such chaos from happening again. But by “tougher rules,” maybe Americans are really signaling a vague but persistent dissatisfaction with an economy that has become dominated by the financial sector. And you can see within that how transforming banking back to its traditional purpose — as a conduit for putting capital in the hands of worthwhile business ventures and driving shared prosperity — would be one antidote to an unequal society full of financial titan gatekeepers, who confiscate a giant share of the money flowing through the system.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren — in many ways the avatar of a new populist insurgency within the Democratic Party that seeks to combine financial reform and economic restoration — will speak later today in Washington at the launch of a new report that marks a key new phase in this movement. Released by Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute – and called “An Unfinished Mission: Making Wall Street Work for Us” — the report is a revelation, because it finally invites fundamental discussions about these issues. Its 11 chapters from some of the leading thinkers on financial reform do look back at the successes and failures of the signal financial reform law of this generation, the Dodd-Frank Act. But the report also weaves in a story about how we can reorient finance as a complement to the real economy, rather than its overriding force. Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the co-editor of the report, tells Salon, “The financial sector is still eating up a lot of GDP [gross domestic product], and it’s not clear what we’re getting out of it. We want to get the conversation at that level.”
I particularly like it when Dave Dayen notes that, "Kleptocracies aren’t known for their economic vitality, but that’s what we have with a Wall Street-dominated economy."
Of course, I won't be satisfied until I see Bob Rubin marched out of his offices in handcuffs, but I'm funny that way.