So I’m reading this piece by Charlie Gasparino about why Wall Street has more love for the current administration than the media generally wants to admit, and I remembered earlier this year that everyone was all OBAMA IS GONNA TAX TEH BANKZ OMG and I made this little photoshop of Jamie Dimon falling out of love with President Obama. Photoshops, like history, are of course bound for revision, and so now we have Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue smitten again, at least per Charlie G:

Mr. Obama has supposedly alienated the heads of the big banks to such an extent that they’ve spent most of their campaign cash on Republican candidates in tomorrow’s midterm elections… But based on my reporting, including interviews with senior banking executives, Wall Street doesn’t so much love the Republican Party as it is hedging its bets on divided government. And barring an independent run by Mr. Bloomberg (which even his most optimistic Wall Street supporters concede is a long shot), the big bankers are planning once again to return to Mr. Obama’s side for 2012.

Okay, so this would suggest they want a divided government, either because a) they don’t want it meddling in anything else or b) they want friends both in the White House and down the Congressional aisles so they’ll be able to go to Mommy when Daddy says no. And Gasparino says most of these fatcats are also social liberals, so barring a run from Bloomberg, Obama doesn’t chafe them in that area, either. But then he goes on to suggest that Obama has perhaps been a better friend to Wall Street than Main Street:

Wall Street leaders know that despite the public chastising and name-calling (“fat-cat bankers,” etc.), and July’s signing into law of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, they’ve benefited disproportionately from Mr. Obama’s policies.

What did Main Street get? An $800 billion “stimulus” package that utterly failed to live up to the administration’s predictions of keeping unemployment below 8%.

Meanwhile Wall Street and the banks—for all their fussing over Dodd-Frank or the Volcker Rule’s tighter restrictions on speculative trading—have been enormously profitable since 2008, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s near-zero interest rate policy and a host of guarantees and other programs that have remained in place well into the first two years of Mr. Obama’s term. These include protecting firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as too-big-to-fail, guaranteeing the banks’ debt and subsidizing the purchase of toxic assets from their balance sheets with taxpayer funds, even as the Fed purchased mortgage debt in the open market, thus propping up the prices of these bonds.

Main Street? You can haz unemployment. Wall Street? Gasparino holds that the dressing-down of Wall Street under Obama has been merely occasional, and that mostly the bailout has been shop as usual, and that Dodd-Frank doesn’t stop the future flow of funds-of-fail to a bank in need. Additionally, many bankers have been absolutely delighted that the administration didn’t get on board with the idea of a foreclosure moratorium, so there’s that, too.

Oh, and… the other breed of elephant in the room:

Furthermore, as much as the heads of the big Wall Street firms hate the new rules in Dodd-Frank that squeeze their trading and force them to hold more capital, there’s one thing they hate even more—tea partiers, who have become the new activist wing in the Republican Party.

It’s true, many of the most vocal about ending “too big to fail,” stopping the bailouts, burning the fatcats on a stake, etc, have been over in that neo-populist camp, so it’s not surprising that Wall Street would seek to get as far away from them as possible.

When it comes down to it, I guess Gasparino’s saying expect more of the same in terms of fiscal and monetary policy, as the bankers are gonna keep playing the field. Invest, or stockpile, accordingly.