No nonsense Wall Street titans playing nice with Mamdani are part of the problem

What are these Wall Street titans afraid of, exactly?Jamie Dimon and David Solomon — maybe the two most powerful bankers in New York — are invariably described as “tough,” “no nonsense” and “hard-charging.”Yet when they each met up last week with the city’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, you’d think they had just toured a rose garden with Xi Jinping.Dimon and Mamdani held a “friendly” and “constructive dialogue” on Monday, a JPMorgan source told me.The pair chatted about the need for “public-private partnerships.” A few hours later at Gracie Mansion, an insider told me that Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, visited the mayor, and nobody mentioned Ken Griffin, the billionaire boss of hedge fund giant Citadel.It was Griffin, you’ll recall, whose Manhattan penthouse Mamdani used as the backdrop for a noxious video on “taxing the rich.” Griffin’s name didn’t come up with Dimon, either, because “Dimon and Solomon made it clear that the mayor shouldn’t do things to discourage business from staying in the city,” a person with knowledge of the conversations said.This is what passes for straight talk from big bank bosses these days? With a 34-year-old lefty politico who never held a private sector job, who won’t condemn “globalize the intifada” and who actually believes the government should open nearly half a dozen grocery stores in New York City?Last week, I fired off a column that revealed how Griffin — who condemned Mamdani’s video as “creepy” — had remained the undisturbed elephant in the room during these pleasant huddles.

It was nice to see that at least Dimon — about 24 hours after we gave him this prod — tried to set the record straight.In a Bloomberg TV interview, ­Dimon called the mayor an “ideologue,” adding, “I don’t care what he says.”Instead, Dimon will be watching whether New York becomes a better place to live and work on Mamdani’s watch.If it doesn’t, people and business...