G.O.P. Gets More of Wall Street’s Moolah

On Monday, Goldman Sachs’s Hank Paulson, a longtime Republican, is expected to be sworn in as the next Treasury Secretary of the United States. His successor, Lloyd Blankfein, has already taken over as Goldman’s chief executive, putting a Democrat in charge of the world’s largest securities firm. Given the strong and shifting ties between Wall Street and Washington — not to mention the upcoming midterm elections in Congress — it seems a good time to ask: What are the political leanings of the major financial firms?

To gauge this, we looked at the contributions by the financial firms’ political action committees, both in the latest election cycle and the one of 2004. The data, which include donations to individual candidates but excludes contributions to other political action committees, party organizations and the groups known as 527’s, come from the Federal Election Commission, as compiled and posted to the Web by PoliticalMoneyLine.com.

Of the companies we examined — Goldman, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — all have donated more money to Republicans than Democrats in the latest election cycle, a result that will probably surprise no one.

But there was another, more counterintuitive, trend: The data suggest that most of the bulge-bracket firms are betting even more heavily on Republicans in this election cycle compared with 2004. This shift to the right comes even as many political pundits say they expect Democratic lawmakers to fare better in the upcoming elections than they have in a decade.

There’s more. Check out http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=4834