For as long as the current day American left has been around, it has had a very clear Big Bad: Wall Street.
From the initial eruption of Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park in 2011 through Sen. Bernie Sanders' two presidential primary runs, the left has been animated by animus toward an ever more expansive and all-powerful financial sector. Wall Street, according to this narrative, is the enforcer of the neoliberal orthodoxy that is dedicated to austere budgets, punishing labor discipline, and supplicancy toward the market.
Yet over the past decade — and especially since the pandemic cratered the global economy — a funny thing has happened within the world of Big Money: a small but growing number of finance professionals have begun talking like leftists.
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Driving this huge shift on Wall Street is a fundamental reckoning with the failures of the past few decades of macroeconomic policy in the US.
For decades, mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike have sworn fealty to neoclassical economics. The neoclassical orthodoxy mandated public spending cuts to reduce deficits, rollbacks of labor protections, and ever greater freedom to move capital across international borders and into voguish new financial products.
This was all done in the name of conquering the rampant inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and thus restoring investor confidence, leading to more innovation, jobs, and economic growth. But the fruits of this economic program were soaring income inequality, repeated financial bubbles, slowing employment and wage growth, and rising costs of healthcare, housing and education.
Investors, meanwhile, mostly haven't put their returns back into job-creating businesses: instead, they have parked mind-boggling amounts of cash in speculative financial assets and overseas tax havens.
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Bob Jain, the former Credit Suisse managing director and current CIO of the gargantuan investment firm Millennium Management, has gone even further. The Jain Family Institute bankrolls research to support a fleet of progressive economic ideas such as Universal Basic Income, econometrics beyond GDP that take into account wealth distribution, and means of scoring the economic, social, and political impact of different investments.
JFI also publishes a website, Phenomenal World, focused on cutting edge social science, economics, and political economy with a distinctly left-wing perspective.
Phenomenal World runs essays like one from July on the way the global dollar system buttresses American empire — the kind of thing one might expect to see published by socialist magazine Jacobin, not a hedge fund guy's personal think tank.
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One prominent figure in the left wing finance discourse, Alex Williams, a research analyst at
Employ America who tweets as @tragicbios, said he has been in dialogue with more finance professionals than academic economists. Despite the industry's reputation, Williams has not been surprised that post-Keynesian economics has found a following among people who actually work on Wall Street, explaining that "the closer you get to the actual machinery, the more it matters your conceptual frame is right."
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Unprompted, several who spoke for this story brought up Kalecki's famous essay, "Political Aspects of Full Employment," which argued that the owners of capital would prefer to sacrifice growing profits stemming from increased consumer purchasing power in order to maintain their position atop the social hierarchy and discipline among their workers, increasing the elites' slice of the economic pie rather than increasing overall output.
That's a radical break with recent orthodox economic and financial discourse, which maintained that more business- and investor-friendly policies would ultimately strengthen the economy and increase overall growth, with wealth trickling down to workers in the form of lower consumer costs and more jobs.
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Even more concretely, these new-thinking finance professionals are taking their ideas directly to the politicians who share their philosophy. Sanaullah doesn't just trade on the framework: he has worked on Ocasio-Cortez's campaigns and written fiscal policy memos for her office.
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