Investment guru Jim Cramer says Wall Street’s financial community fears the possibility of Sen. Elizabeth Warren becoming president.
“It would be a suboptimal situation for the banks” if Warren were to win the Democratic nomination, Cramer recently said on CNBC.
Warren, a champion of consumer financial protections, has pushed for big, "structural" changes to an economy that "does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else."
“When you get off the desk and talk to executives, they’re more fearful of her winning,” Cramer said. Cramer said he’s hearing a “she’s got to be stopped” mantra bubbling up among corporate executives.
She wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and use the money to help pay for a number of progressive priorities including universal childcare, student debt relief and Medicare for All, which would provide federal health insurance coverage for all Americans based on the existing government-run Medicare program for Americans 65 and older, Reuters explained.
Unlike most of the other candidates, Warren's popularity among Democrats and independents has steadily increased this year. Others, like U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, have declined in popularity over the summer.
CNBC’s David Faber tells Cramer that he’s hearing the same rumblings about Wall Street dreading a possible Warren presidency. “It’s another reason why companies are being implored to do things now ... because come early to mid-2020 if Elizabeth Warren is rolling along, everybody is going to be like, ‘That’s it,’” Faber said.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg recently reported that billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett could have collectively lost hundreds of billions of dollars in net worth over decades if Warren’s wealth tax plan had been in effect — and they had done nothing to avoid it.
That’s according to calculations in a new paper by two French economists, who helped her devise the proposed tax on the wealthiest Americans.
The top 15 richest Americans would have seen their net worth decline by more than half to $433.9 billion had Warren’s plan had been in place since 1982, according to the paper by University of California, Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
Despite relying on some hypothetical assumptions, the calculations highlight what could be a key question in Thursday’s debate among Democratic Party presidential contenders: What should the U.S. do to address yawning income and wealth inequality?
The authors’ figures don’t take into account any steps billionaires might have taken to reduce their exposure to the tax, including saving less or giving more money away. Instead, the paper assumes that rich Americans effectively do the opposite: they reduce, rather than increase, charitable giving and consumption, in proportion to the wealth lost through the tax.
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