Bankers meet to target small business
TEXT OF STORY
Steve Chiotakis: President Obama meets this morning with Wall Street bankers. The president had a similar meeting back in March. At that meeting, there was discussion about repayment of bailout money and executive compensation. But there are new issues this time, as Marketplace’s Jeremy Hobson reports.
Jeremy Hobson: Nearly all of the bankers at today’s meeting have already paid back the government for last year’s bailout. Now President Obama needs a favor from them: More lending to small businesses and consumers.
Former investment banker Douglas Elliot is a fellow at the Brookings Institution:
Douglas Elliot: The administration needs to show yet again that they care about the recession, they care about unemployment and that they recognize that small business is a key to getting employment back on its feet.
The President may also use the meeting to urge bankers to get on board with financial regulatory reform. Though Elliot says he could have done all this by phone.
Elliot: There’s nothing that will be accomplished in this meeting that couldn’t have been accomplished in other ways. It just makes it more visible.
That’s the polite way to put it. A banking analyst I spoke with put it another way: It’s all for show, he said.
In New York, I’m Jeremy Hobson for Marketplace.
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