CEOS: OBAMA EVEN SCARIER THAN THE RISK OF COLLAPSE IN EUROPE

Jim Cramer asks CEOs of industrial companies what they’re particularly worried about these days. Guess what? It ain’t the Eurozone!:

[A]s much as we on Wall Street fret every day about Europe, mostly about the imminent collapse of Italy, these execs, and I ask them all, are far more worried about the president and the Democrats and the obstacles they place on success.

They think there is a deep-down anti-success bias.

They think that the president is so anti-profit that he is the biggest hindrance to their successes, not Europe. They feel they can work around Europe but they know, in their hearts, that the president does not want them to succeed. . . .

They believe that the president does not think that their successes translate into anything good for the country. In fact, they think that the more successful the shareholders are the more the president feels the country is ripped off by them because the president doesn’t seem to understand that so many people in this country own stock in one way or another and need the stock market to do well.

They think that stocks are also a dirty word with him because poorer people don’t own stocks and he is their representative, not the shareholders’ representative. They think that the president believes only Republicans own stocks, so who cares about them.

When I press them on this, asking them what makes the president so anti-business, they laugh. They say that the president’s agenda isn’t per se, out-loud, anti-business, it’s just anti-wealth and pro-labor and, most of all, pro-Green. There’s no room for anything else on the agenda. [Emph. added]

And not even a mention of the Obama doctrine that holds that productivity growth is bad for economic growth rather than good. Remember when Keynes wrote about how, at bottom, it’s “animal spirits–a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction”–that drives economic activity? These guys are the animals whose spirits, should they undergo the kind of spontaneous urge to action that Keynes had in mind, would produce a very big bang for the, er, urge. Luckily, they also seem to understand that Obama is in full re-election mode now, and will be too busy to harass them for awhile. That’s bullish. . . .