With Kamala Harris leading the presidential polls, one of the big questions for Wall Street and corporate America is what her economic policies will be: Will they be a word-for-word copy of the progressive platitudes known as Bidennomics?
After all, she sat idly by while her boss, Joe Biden, and Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan blocked smart deals and filed stupid antitrust lawsuits against Big Tech companies.
She said nothing when Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chairman transformed the investor protection agency into an enforcement arm of a woke economy.
After being nominated by party leaders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris now says she wants to get inflation under control.
But before Biden was thrown out the window as the party’s nominee, she was his vice president, poised to break tie votes in a narrowly divided U.S. Senate and approve trillions of dollars in spending that would ultimately stomp up inflation and become a onerous tax on the working class.
Sure, her progressive credentials are impressive, but Wall Street allies are now looking to raise campaign funds from more moderate executives, spreading the rumor that Kamala 2.0 is much more ideologically fluid.
She loves fracking, and she loves the business world — her husband is a media and entertainment lawyer who represented large corporations, so she understands that it’s an engine of economic growth.
From what I’ve heard, she’s skeptical of sideline funding — and she should be. Late last week, during a highly publicized economic speech, she began by musing about food price controls and other freebies in places like Venezuela and the former Soviet Union.
To counter this, Harris’ fundraisers have offered further evidence that Kamala is a moderate, citing Brian Deese, a former financier and described as an economic moderate who has joined her campaign advisers.
They say Deese would likely play a large role in the administration if elected, and that Harris, despite her rhetoric, would not govern as a Bernie Sanders-style leftist.
I have doubts, not just because I think Harris is a liar, but I also question Deese’s credibility as a “moderate.”
As I report in my new book, “Go Woke Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America,” Deese worked in the Obama administration and more recently served on Biden’s economic team.
During that time, he spent three years at BlackRock, which he joined after helping President Obama negotiate America’s entry into the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims for a net-zero carbon future, but the Trump administration withdrew from it because it did little to address the climate problem and led to higher gas prices for average Americans.
That’s bad for America, but it’s the perfect background for becoming an in-house advocate for BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and promoting the firm’s controversial environmental, social and governance investing.
Before ESG became a key pillar of the country’s culture wars, it was a big jackpot inside BlackRock because it allowed the firm to charge investors higher fees for virtue-signaling investments.
First, benefit from ESG
Mr. Deess was highly successful in his job, former employees say, as BlackRock attracted billions of dollars in assets from pension funds run by progressive politicians, left-leaning sovereign wealth managers and individual investors who wanted to save the planet while they invested.
In late 2020, Deese left the firm and quickly joined the Biden administration as director of the National Economic Council, essentially taking over his predecessor’s job by injecting mindful policymaking into the White House’s failing economic policies.
At BlackRock, things got worse. As I show in my book, the beginning of 2021 is when consumers began to rebel against any form of corporate wokeness.
Fink himself has been publicly criticized by Republican state politicians for bringing politics into investing, forcing oil companies to cut back on drilling at a time when gasoline prices were soaring.
BlackRock has lost assets from investors who see it as left-leaning, and its ESG funds have been tarnished by losses to low-cost index funds.
As is well known, Americans are disappointed with the Biden administration’s economy due to sluggish inflation and wage growth, despite favorable employment statistics. Harris is trying to turn the situation around by rebranding herself as a “moderate” and other tactics.
My guess is that this image change may be well received by the less economically literate segments of the mainstream media, but it will be less popular with corporate insiders.
Her price-gouging scheme presumably met with Mr. Deese’s approval, and would be scoffed at by anyone who has taken an introductory economics course.
Maybe that’s why we hear even undecided Democratic donors say they want to know who Harris will appoint to key economic posts other than Deese before giving their money.
