There’s a new whisper on Wall Street -- maybe Elizabeth Warren isn’t so bad.
The Democratic senator, who rose to national prominence by calling for tough regulation after the financial crisis, is winning respect from a small but growing circle of senior bankers and hedge fund managers. As the presidential candidate from Massachusetts takes aim at the “rich and powerful” with a slew of tax-raising policy proposals, some financial types who fit that description say she’s proven capable and makes some good points.
“If she ends up being the nominee, I’d have no trouble supporting her at all,” said David Schamis, chief investment officer of Atlas Merchant Capital, where he’s a founding partner alongside former Barclays Plc head Bob Diamond. While Warren isn’t Schamis’s top choice, he said: “I think she is smart, hardworking, responsible and thoughtful. And I think she thinks markets are important.”
Schamis said people in his network who studied under Warren, a former professor at Harvard Law School, think highly of her, including some conservatives.
Warren emerged early as one of the strongest contenders for the Democratic nomination, and she’s been generating buzz in recent weeks with detailed policy proposals and a well-regarded performance in the first major debate. A CNN poll taken after the two nights of debates and released Monday showed her in third place among Democrats with 15%, an increase of eight points since a poll from the cable network in May. Former Vice President Joe Biden drew 22% and California Senator Kamala Harris 17%.
For some Wall Streeters who lean liberal, Warren is an acceptable alternative to candidates who trigger their most visceral objections: Republican President Donald Trump on the right and Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, on the left.
It would be “just wrong,” Warren told CBS’s “Face the Nation” in March, to call her a democratic socialist: “I believe in markets. Markets that work. Markets that have a cop on the beat and have real rules and everybody follows them.”
At other times, she has derided parts of the financial industry as predatory.
Creating CFPB
“I clearly don’t agree with everything she says, but I do give her credit for getting things done,” Tom Nides, a Morgan Stanley vice chairman and former deputy secretary of state under Barack Obama, said of Warren. He didn’t share which candidate he’s supporting.