The president hasn’t been known for deep ties to the business community or Wall Street. He has spent almost his entire adult life as a politician, and as a US senator, he was much more closely identified with foreign policy and judicial fights than with economic issues.
“I don’t think President Biden has a relationship with the business community. It’s unsurprising when you think about it because he was not a senator who trafficked in these circles,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-leaning research group American Action Forum and the former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.
Commodities, Credit Card Usage
But the White House has tried to forge relationships. Biden asked the chief executives of Walmart, Doug McMillon, and Target, Brian Cornell, to explain how commodity prices affect prices for food, and he discussed trends in Americans’ credit card use with the CEOs of Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America, according to the people.
Bank of America’s Moynihan is the banker Biden speaks to most frequently, according to one White House official. A representative for the bank declined to comment.
Biden’s one-on-one calls with CEOs over the past several months have also included Citigroup’s Jane Fraser; Ken Chenault, former chairman and CEO of American Express Co. and Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron Technology Inc., according to the people.
“He really does talk to everyone, so it’s not like he’ll ever say, ‘I want to talk to everybody except the bankers.’ That’s not where he is,” said Jared Bernstein, a longtime aide who is now a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. “But neither will he ever think he’s getting the real rundown of the economy by talking to someone from the top 1%.”
Executives, donors and lobbyists from the investment world say they have little contact with the White House or the upper echelons of the Biden administration, aside from Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Deese, a former BlackRock Inc. executive.
Early in the administration, Raimondo joked on a call with business leaders that she was the highest-ranking economic official in the Biden administration with private-sector experience, according to a person who was on the call. A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Raimondo and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh have since the beginning of the year been brought into Biden’s economic briefings, the people said.
The president’s views of the economy are also shaped by his informal encounters with friends and ordinary Americans in Delaware, where he spends most weekends.
When Biden was vice president, a random man at a hardware store told him he didn’t understand credit card legislation the Obama-Biden administration had proposed. So, Biden called a top aide on Saturday from the middle of the shop to say the White House needed to do a better job of explaining the bill to regular people.
Biden’s taken that attitude to the White House. Top aides are often barraged with follow-up questions resulting from his brief Delaware interactions, two senior White House officials said. The president might want to know, for example, why the price of milk is down while eggs cost more, one said.
--With assistance from Katherine Doherty.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.