A few well-placed Wall Street executives with ties to the administration have made some contact.
“The 2011 brinkmanship depressed business and consumer confidence, crashed the stock market and increased borrowing costs,” White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa said, referring to the last time the nation teetered on the edge of default amid protracted congressional negotiations. “The best thing for businesses and the economy broadly would be for congressional Republicans to stop taking the economy hostage and avoid default, as they did three times under the last president.
In 2011, Larry Fink, the CEO of the investment company BlackRock, corralled a dozen asset management executives to sign a letter demanding that the Obama administration and congressional leaders reach a deal to avert a default. But the letter was dated July 25 — one week before the deadline — when a breach was becoming an increasingly possible scenario. Fink didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether he plans to engage now.
In past fights with high economic stakes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a titan of K Street that represents millions of businesses of varying sizes — took the lead in Washington for the business community. But relations between the GOP and the Chamber have deteriorated, spurred by the business group’s stances on social issues and the Republican Party’s Trump-led move to populism. That has left businesses with few allies on Capitol Hill.
“To state the obvious, it’s not 2011,” Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer, said when he was asked about the group’s waning influence among Republicans in the last decade. “The biggest difference … is in 2011, then-President Obama and then-Vice President Biden were actively engaged in negotiations and viewed attaching fiscal restraint measures to the debt limit as a reasonable kind of legitimate exercise.