“I don’t think you have to actually have an address on Wall Street to be a part of Wall Street. I don’t think anybody gets confused that Bain Capital is part of that whole Wall Street structure. I don’t think that’s lost on anybody,” Perry told The Huffington Post Saturday.

In part, Perry attempted to very broadly indict an entire culture of Washington elites that profits in a variety of ways from the fire hose of money that flows through the nation’s capital — and a financial industry in New York that has hitched its wagon to the political class.

The problem is that Romney worked for a private equity firm that leveraged investor money — oftentimes from Wall Street banks, but also from other sources — and not for a financial services company that specialized in creating exotic derivatives of questionable integrity. Private equity firms were not a main cause of the economic crisis and also were not in need of bailouts, though some of these firms were creditors of the major automobile companies and received government money during the auto bailouts.