Wall Street’s bid to clean up image hits a wall

Bad news for financial titans like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs Group’s Lloyd Blankfein: Most Americans hold unfavorable views of Wall Street banks and corporate executives, and distrust billionaires more than they admire them.

Despite efforts by Wall Street firms to regain trust since the 2008 financial crisis, fewer than a third of Americans view the industry positively — unchanged from 2009, according to the latest Bloomberg National Poll.

Dimon, 61, and Blankfein, 62, each chief executives for more than a decade, have sought to influence the public policy debate on issues including infrastructure investment, regulation, education, immigration and corporate tax reform. Both were revealed as billionaires in 2015, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Yet the poll shows that Americans are much more likely to distrust billionaires than admire them, 53 percent to 31 percent. And just 31 percent look favorably on corporate executives and Wall Street.

Big banks “are still pushing for deregulation and they are going to get us right back to where we were with the financial crisis,” said poll participant Chad Boyd, 36, an independent voter and information technology worker who lives in Louisville, Colo., about 10 miles east of Boulder.

Bankers, for their part, have been expressing their sympathy for Americans’ frustrations. Dimon unleashed a diatribe last week about the nation’s failure to address the opioid epidemic, economic growth and education, blaming dysfunctional politics and the media. Blankfein recently took to Twitter, calling for unity in Washington and for the U.S. to emulate China’s infrastructure programs.

The CEOs have sought to rehabilitate their banks’ brands in the wake of a crisis that left more than 8 million Americans out of work and cost shareholders tens of billions of dollars in fines and legal settlements. Blankfein, for example, created a business standards committee and responded to public outrage over Goldman Sachs’s compensation practices by taking $500 million from bonuses to provide money and advice to budding entrepreneurs.

But two major events last year — Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s surprise election — show the limits of the bankers’ sway over the public. Both Dimon and Blankfein opposed Brexit and indicated their support for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Spokesmen for JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Republicans are much more likely to admire billionaires than Democrats, 53 percent to 17 percent. For some poll participants, the popularity of billionaires depends on the billionaire.

“Sometimes they do stuff against the little guy” and don’t always give back to help society, said Leigh Lamon, 36, a preschool teacher from Bothell, Wash., a suburb of Seattle. However, Lamon said she admires billionaires like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates: “He has done a lot of good.”

The telephone poll of 1,001 American adults has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, higher among subgroups.

“Sometimes they do stuff against the little guy.” Leigh Lamon, a preschool teacher

BRYAN R. SMITH/GETTY-AFP A recent poll found just 31 percent of people look favorably on executives and Wall Street.