President Obama has called people who work on Wall Street "fat-cat bankers," and his reelection campaign has sought to harness public frustration with Wall Street. Financial executives retort that the president's pursuit of financial regulations is punitive and that new rules may be "holding us back."But both sides face an inconvenient fact: During Obama's tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled.
The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data.
Wall Street firms -- independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks -- are doing even better. They earned more in the first 21 / 2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show.
Behind this turnaround, in significant measure, are government policies that helped the financial sector avert collapse and then gave financial firms huge benefits on the path to recovery. For example, the federal government invested hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in banks -- low-cost money that the firms used for high-yielding investments on which they made big profits.