With the cost of a 2016 presidential campaign expected to reach more than $1 billion, a candidate will need some rich friends. Fortunately for Hillary Clinton, she has plenty of those on Wall Street.

Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive and now senior fellow at the nonpartisan public policy institute Demos, writes that Clinton should be able to count on help from large financial institutions. Prins is the author of All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power.

Clinton has spent decades, both in her own career and as First Lady during Bill Clinton’s presidency, forging strong relationships with financial industry executives. She has maintained these ties despite recent efforts to portray herself as a populist candidate.

Of the six most generous donors to her political career, four are Wall Street firms: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. A fifth is DLA Piper, a law firm that represents big banks.

“Though she may, in the heat of that campaign, raise the bad apples or bad situation explanation for Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, rest assured that she will not point fingers at her friends,” Prins wrote at TomDispatch.com. “She will not chastise the people that pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones that have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move.”

Prins added that it is “naïve” for anyone to think Clinton, or any other serious candidate, can maintain a “critical distance” between the White House and Wall Street “given the multiple channels of money and favors that flow between the two.”

“It is even more improbable,” Prins argues, “given the history of connections that Hillary Clinton has established through her associations with key bank leaders in the early 1990s, during her time as a senator from New York, and given their contributions to the Clinton foundation while she was secretary of state. At some level, the situation couldn’t be less complicated: her path aligns with that of the country’s most powerful bankers. If she becomes president, that will remain the case.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

To Learn More:

Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Hillary, Bill, and the Big Six Banks (by Nomi Prins, TomDispatch)

Hillary Clinton Is Grooming A Former Goldman Banker To Become America's Next Treasury Secretary (by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge)

All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power (by Nomi Prins)

10-Year Anniversary of the Bill That Led to the Current Economic Crisis (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)