Warren Praises Sanders Plan to Dismantle Big Banks

When host Joe Scarborough subsequently asked Sanders whether Clinton specifically had the courage to reign in supposed Wall Street excess, Sanders didn’t let Scarborough finish the question.

Critically, this policy argument creates a wide gulf between Sanders and his main opponent, Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. These are just a few of the strongly-worded statements from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ speech on Tuesday (January 5), in which he reiterated his platform of sweeping financial reforms.

“And here is a New Year’s resolution that I will keep if elected president, and that is, if Wall Street does not end its greed, we will end it for them. If you do not end your greed, we will end it for you”.

“I think what you have is a situation where banks are not only too big to fail, bankers are too big to jail”, he added. In 2008, the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street almost destroyed the US and global economy.

“If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust-buster, were alive today, he would say ‘break ’em up.’ And he would be right”.

And, here’s how I will accomplish that. “Within one-year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy”, he said. Sanders’s campaign has also signed a fundraising agreement with the DNC but did not raise anything for it in the fourth quarter, though it says it will moving forward. The Great Recession was only possible because of the bottomless corruption of these institutions, which knowingly issued triple-A ratings to fraudulent financial products. Sanders continued, “While Wall Street received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world with no strings attached, the American middle class continues to disappear, poverty is increasing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider”. Secretary Clinton is wrong. Clinton argues that regulators should focus on “shadow banks” instead of the big banks targeted by Glass-Steagall. He also supports the reinstatement of a modern Glass-Steagall Act to separate commercial banking, investment banking and insurance services – a move Clinton has not embraced. The opposition on the Glass-Steagall Act comes from Clinton, endorsing the fact that this legislation was a major cause for the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

He said allowing banks that are too big is essentially providing them with a “free insurance policy” to make risky investments knowing the United States government will prevent their collapse. “Senator Sanders won’t be taking advice on how to regulate Wall Street from a former Goldman Sachs partner and a former Treasury Department official who helped Wall Street rig the system”, Briggs said.

To rolling waves of applause at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gave his most stirring speech yet in defense of the American people, their institutions and their future in the fight against the greed and self-interest of the private interests headquartered at Wall Street.

This was a hard-hitting speech, and an indiciation of where the Democratic race is heading. But while she has tagged Sanders’s ideas as simply too costly or unrealistic in other areas (like health care, college financing, and infrastructure), she is making a more assertive case on financial reform.

Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she won’t need a “tour of the White House” if she wins the presidency, warning again and again that a Republican in the Oval Office would spell disaster for a Democratic agenda.