2008: "Why Washington Hates Wall Street"

I don't think I've ever seen the rivalry explained so succinctly - though perhaps the most depressing part of this is that despite how the financial crisis was created in Washington through incentives structured badly, it's Wall Street got the blame (Slate via Instapundit):

“Isn’t this exciting?” Rep. Ed Markey enthused to me on Oct. 19, 1987 (“Black Monday”). A young congressional correspondent for Newsweek with nary a stock or bond to my name, even I was taken aback by Markey’s undisguised pleasure. When you stop and think about it, though, it makes perfect sense. Modern Washington owes its very existence to the 1929 crash, which occasioned a vast expansion of the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A legacy of the increase in federal power during that era, largely undiminished during a 28-year electoral backlash against big government, is that Washington became Wall Street’s principal rival when it came to running the world. Which wielded more power—the financial markets or the government? Uncle Sam had the world’s largest military, but Wall Street had all that goddamned money. The mansions in Greenwich, Conn.; the trophy wives; the private jets—by comparison, the people who wielded power in Washington—including most presidents—were petits bourgeois. Even libertarian conservatives resent, on a personal level, the Wall Street swells whose interests they fight for daily. There aren’t a lot of millionaires working at the Cato Institute [...]

Let me put it in terms a smart financial journalist like Brauchli can readily understand. On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.