By Colin Brown

Temperatures hit 32˚C degrees this April in New York, beating a record that has stood since 1929, the year of the original Wall Street Crash. And once again, it was the financial sector feeling the heat.

Universally blamed for triggering the global financial crisis through wanton greed, Wall Street’s “fat cat bankers”, as President Obama branded them, are having their feet held to the fire by politicians and regulators eager to score populist points ahead of next year’s Congressional elections.

New York’s big investment banks are now in the crosshairs of a likely bill designed to curtail their most egregious behaviour. What’s more, Goldman Sachs, arguably the most powerful of the bunch, has been slapped with a civil suit accusing it of fraud. According to the Securities & Exchange Commission, Goldman created and sold a mortgage investment that was devised to fail. In essence, it was betting on the collapse of the housing market.

The fact that amid all this rising tide of anger, the Dow Jones Industry Average has managed to creep over the psychological 11,000 threshhold for the first time in 17 months has only inflamed matters. Those soaring stock prices are widely seen as a function of the trillions of taxpayer dollars used to prop up Wall Street in the form of loans, guarantees and liquidity initiatives – hand-outs that Wall Street then lavished upon itself in the form of bonuses and also used to fight against meaningful reform.

All of which puts Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, in an interesting position. As someone who has made billions selling information to those very financial institutions, he has little vested interest in seeing Wall Street cut down to size. Sure enough, he went to Washington to slam Obama’s planned clampdown, arguing that banks and Wall Street are the bedrock of the city’s economy. Efforts to slash their business would mean less tax revenue for the city, resulting in more layoffs, he insists. Saddle New York’s banks with more regulation than their overseas competitors, and they will simply run offshore.

But there might be more at play here than just New York self interest. As the sudden rise of the anti-government Tea-Party movement has underscored, the time is ripe in the US for an independent party to break the gridlock between Republicans and Democrats. And guess whose name keeps popping up as a potential third-party presidential candidate for 2012? In Bloomberg, Corporate America could count on an entrepreneurial presence in the White House – one whose iconoclasm and immense personal fortune would theoretically make him immune to financial arm-twisting from Big Business.