And who has the closest connection with Wall Street? Romney.
Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-has-more-cash-from-financial-sector-than-gop-hopefuls-combined-data-show/2011/10/18/gIQAX4rAyL_story.htmlObama's new chief of staff is Bill Daley who has strong Wall Street connections, including a stint with JP Morgan Chase.
Michael Froman, Obama deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration. Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.
Obama's deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under federal receivership.
Neal Wolin, Obama's selection for deputy counsel to the president for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama appointed
Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council and was Obama's top economic adviser. Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers. For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with $135,000.
Obama's appointee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Schapiro, led the finance industry's own regulatory body, which, unsurprisingly, did nothing to rein in Wall Street's speculative orgy. Obama's appointee to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, drafted the legislation in 2000 that exempted derivatives, including credit-default swaps, from regulation.
Obama appointed Gene Sperling"another figure with close ties to Wall Street" to head the White House's National Economic Council. As NEC chair in the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s, Sperling pushed for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and other financial regulations, fueling the speculative frenzy that led to the Wall Street crash of 2008. Sperling also worked as a consultant for Goldman Sachs and several hedge funds.
