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When I went to see Mr. Scaramucci a few days later, my purpose was to get him to explain to me why it is that Wall Street feels so beleaguered. I’d been having a difficult time understanding it. Yes, the “fat cat” rhetoric can’t be much fun to listen to, but is it really any worse than the political rhetoric used against health insurance executives, or the big oil companies or the teachers’ unions? Hardly. In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt said of the financial industry executives, “They are unanimous in their hate for me  and I welcome their hatred.” Mr. Obama hasn’t said anything approaching that level of venom.

Nor have his deeds been as punitive as Roosevelt’s were. The big banks aren’t being broken up, the way they were in the 1930s. Bankers aren’t being hauled off to jail. No serious effort has been made to rein in executive compensation  or even to claw back millions of dollars in bonuses that were based on what turned out to be illusory profits. Most of the financial practices and products that brought us to the brink remain legal under the new Dodd-Frank legislation  though they will, finally, be regulated. All things considered, Wall Street has gotten off pretty easy.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Scaramucci didn’t see it that way. To his way of thinking, all of Wall Street was being blamed for the actions of a few bad apples. “You have 500 to 1,000 rogues on Wall Street,” he said. “They were the ones who did counterproductive things to the society. There were 25 guys at A.I.G. who blew up the whole company. It was a very small number. They were the devil on Wall Street. My assistant works on Wall Street. She’s not the devil. I just met with 50 brokers. They’re not the devil. When the president says ‘all these fat cats,’ he is hurting all of Wall Street.”

What about his old firm, Goldman Sachs? I asked. Didn’t they do things they shouldn’t have? “They probably did,” he replied, but then quickly reverted to his previous theory. “There are probably some bad people at Goldman,” he said. “But it would be very bad if the government took out Goldman Sachs. Goldman is the American dream factory. They can move people from the lower middle class to the ultra rich in one generation.” Therefore, he believed, Goldman should be praised, not scorned.

And so it went. Greed, Mr. Scaramucci conceded, had infected Wall Street during the years leading up to the crisis  but he wouldn’t acknowledge what seems patently obvious to most people: that those who gravitate to Wall Street are far less motivated by a desire to, say, supply capital to struggling start-ups than to get really rich. (He’s even written a high-minded book about all the good one can do on Wall Street, titled “Goodbye Gordon Gekko.”)