What are these Wall Street titans afraid of, exactly?
Jamie Dimon and David Solomon — maybe the two most powerful bankers in New York — are invariably described as “tough,” “no nonsense” and “hard-charging.”
Yet when they each met up last week with the city’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, you’d think they had just toured a rose garden with Xi Jinping.
Dimon and Mamdani held a “friendly” and “constructive dialogue” on Monday, a JPMorgan source told me.
The pair chatted about the need for “public-private partnerships.”
A few hours later at Gracie Mansion, an insider told me that Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, visited the mayor, and nobody mentioned Ken Griffin, the billionaire boss of hedge fund giant Citadel.
It was Griffin, you’ll recall, whose Manhattan penthouse Mamdani used as the backdrop for a noxious video on “taxing the rich.”
Griffin’s name didn’t come up with Dimon, either, because “Dimon and Solomon made it clear that the mayor shouldn’t do things to discourage business from staying in the city,” a person with knowledge of the conversations said.
This is what passes for straight talk from big bank bosses these days?
With a 34-year-old lefty politico who never held a private sector job, who won’t condemn “globalize the intifada” and who actually believes the government should open nearly half a dozen grocery stores in New York City?
Last week, I fired off a column that revealed how Griffin — who condemned Mamdani’s video as “creepy” — had remained the undisturbed elephant in the room during these pleasant huddles.
It was nice to see that at least Dimon — about 24 hours after we gave him this prod — tried to set the record straight.
In a Bloomberg TV interview, Dimon called the mayor an “ideologue,” adding, “I don’t care what he says.”
Instead, Dimon will be watching whether New York becomes a better place to live and work on Mamdani’s watch.
If it doesn’t, people and businesses will continue to “vote with their feet,” Dimon declared.
Now you tell us?
Where were you during last fall’s mayoral campaign when Mamdani promised to transform the epicenter of capitalism into Moscow on the Hudson?
And why didn’t you mention any of this when the smiling Marxist was sitting in your office a few hours earlier?
Yes, Dimon got a few nice headlines on Bloomberg, but there’s an cliché that fitting for people like Jamie, Solly and the rest of our nearly silent business community: If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
Wake up, guys!
Time to step up, guys — that is, if you really care about the future of our city.
I take no pleasure writing any of this because I have immense respect for both Dimon and Solomon.
They’re smart guys who employ people and give plenty away not just in taxes but to charity.
Finance is the last big business other than real estate that remains domiciled here, having survived years of buffoonish political leaders, rampant crime, crappy schools and a deteriorating quality of life.
Wall Street is still here in the sense that they have HQs in Manhattan.
But financial firms are moving people and jobs to places where taxes are lower and the commies aren’t in charge.
JPM now has more people in Texas despite its swanky new digs on Park Avenue.
Goldman has created something like a second HQ in Utah.
So why aren’t Jamie and Solly speaking up more instead of packing up their operations and moving?
Are they worried they would get the same treatment as Griffin?
An exec from one of the firms protested to me that his chief can “have a polite conversation and still speak his mind.”
But was Dimon really “speaking his mind” when he handed Mamdani a book about economic development projects after their little confab?
At least Jamie tried to reflect a bit of the reality that Mamdani brings to New York in that Bloomberg interview (after a little shove by your friendly columnist, or course).
Solomon, meanwhile, has been frighteningly silent.
It’s probably a little unfair to single them out.
I am told nearly all the business chiefs who have met with the mayor have come away charmed by his quick smile and cordial presence.
Nevertheless, Mamdani’s policies are destructive and dangerous.
He’s a left-wing ideologue with an animus toward this country’s founding principles and a Third Worldism that paints Israel as a criminal state — in a city that holds the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Sorry, Jamie & Co., but being polite with someone like this just won’t cut it.
