NEW YORK — Wall Street has a message for bank-bashing U.S. populist politicians: Put down the pitchforks or you could end up like Ed Miliband.

Senior financial executives say the Labour leader’s anti-bank, soak the rich rhetoric helped sink his party in the United Kingdom elections and assure a surprisingly big reelection win for Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party last week. Miliband resigned as Labour leader following the loss.


These bankers and their ideological supporters say if likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton keeps tacking to the left on Wall Street issues — as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, other progressive Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are demanding — she could face the same fate.

“Cameron embraced the role of the financial sector in growing the U.K. economy and creating jobs, never once criticizing hedge funds, banks or the wealthy,” said a top executive at one of Wall Street’s largest firms. “Miliband ran against hedge funds and bankers, promising bonus and mansion taxes and lost big. Is that a lesson for Hillary as well?”

This executive, like several others who cited the U.K. election result as a warning to populists, declined to be identified by name or firm for fear of heavy backlash.

Another executive said Miliband’s adoption of Warren’s approach to the financial sector and banking regulation failed even though U.K. voters trust banks even less than U.S. voters, according to opinion surveys.

It “seems like there might be some political lessons for the U.S. out of the U.K. election — with Miliband’s Warren-style, anti-business, anti-bank rhetoric clearly falling flat with the general public, even as the press ate it up,” this executive from another one of Wall Street’s largest firms said. “And the Edelman trust barometer [a survey that attempts to measure public trust in large institutions] actually shows that British voters are more distrustful and wary of the banks than here in the U.S.”

The financial executives cited Miliband’s attacks on Cameron and the Conservatives as the “party of hedge funds” and his calls for higher taxes on the industry as failing to captivate U.K. voters. And they noted that, despite polls showing a very tight race, Cameron and his party won 51 percent of the seats and 331 seats in Parliament to just 36 percent and 232 seats for Miliband and his Labour Party.

Conservative analysts also said U.S. politicians, including Clinton, should take note of the U.K. result.

“There are two lessons here,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum. “One is the Miliband lesson. The U.S. has now seen that people in the U.K. don’t really like this focus on inequality and redistribution. It’s not where people are. And the second is that conservatives were very effective in saying they were for working people but keeping the focus on work not excessive government intervention and benefits.”

Financial reform advocates in the U.S. say these executives and analysts are reading things into the U.K. results that are not really there.

“Backwards logic like this almost makes you understand why Wall Street executives are deluded enough to believe they shouldn’t be held responsible for blowing up the economy in 2008 and fighting common-sense legislation designed to prevent them from doing it again,” said Neil Sroka, communications director for the progressive group Democracy for America. “If these guys actually believe that Cameron won because he bear-hugged billionaire bankers or think that Democrats will do better in 2016 if they continue treating a thief on Wall Street differently than a thief on Main Street, I’ve got a tranche of decade-old, toxic mortgages I know they’ll want to get in on.”

Dennis Kelleher, head of financial reform group Better Markets, said many other factors were at play in the U.K.

“Claiming the five-week sprint known as the U.K. election — and the Scottish freedom campaign — means anything for the U.S. is nothing more than wishful thinking by Wall Street’s spinners,” he said. Former “Secretary Clinton will be spelling out pro-growth agendas that also protect the American people from Wall Street’s dangerous too big to fail banks. It’s not either/or. It’s both.”

The comments from Wall Street executives and conservative analysts come as some in the industry fear that Clinton will continue to move left on financial reform issues as her campaign progresses.

Clinton used her first trip to Iowa as an announced candidate last month to issue a fresh assault. “There’s something wrong,” she told Iowans, when “hedge fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 when I was driving here over the last two days.”

In a fundraising note last month, Clinton wrote that “families have fought their way back from tough economic times. But it’s not enough — not when the average CEO makes 300 times what the average worker makes.”

Wall Street mostly shrugged off those comments, confident that Clinton, who has enjoyed heavy financial support from the industry, would ultimately govern as a pro-business pragmatist not inclined to bust up big banks or support higher taxes on financial transactions or new controls on executive pay.

But as the “Draft Warren” for president movement continues to gain steam and coalitions of left-wing and right-wing populists in Congress flirt with the idea of breaking up the biggest banks, Wall Street is getting a bit more nervous. And it is pointing to the U.K. results and Republican gains in 2014 in the U.S. as evidence that Clinton should focus on other issues or face a possible loss in 2016.

“I would say that this is the second major election in a row where bank bashing no longer seems to move voters,” said a lobbyist for the banking industry. “Even where voters may continue to have anger about banks, other issues seem to be driving their votes. We saw that last year in the U.S., and now we seem to be seeing an echo in the U.K.”