What Clinton Gets Right, And Wrong, About Wall Street Reform

[eridani]

https://ourfuture.org/20151208/what-clinton-gets-right-and-wrong-about-wall-street-reform

To be fair, Clinton’s positions are generally pointed in the right direction and she said much that needed to be said. Hence, a key section of her op-ed addressing the efforts by congressional Republicans use the budget process to derail important financial regulations and weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the signature achievement of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, was immediately saluted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “Whether it’s attacking the CFPB, undermining new rules to rein in unscrupulous retirement advisers, or rolling back any part of the hard-fought progress we’ve made on financial reform, she and I agree: ‘President

Obama and congressional Democrats should do everything they can to stop these efforts,'” she wrote on her Facebook page.

But careful students of both Warren and Clinton would recognize that the agreement does not go too far from there. In her op-ed, for example, Clinton continues to press her opposition to reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial banking from high-risk financial speculation until the 1990s, a measure that Warren supports. Clinton repeats the same claim she made in the November Democratic debate: Since many of the firms that were major contributors to the 2008 financial crisis, like AIG and Lehman Brothers, weren’t banks, having a Glass-Steagall wall would not have solved the problem.

Richard Eskow not only punctured that argument in his “Five Reasons Glass-Steagall Matters” – “the 2008 financial crisis became a systemic threat specifically because too-big-to-fail banks were underwriting the risky bets these companies made” – but also outlined how the repeal of Glass-Steagall made the banking sector worse even outside of the financial crisis.

Without a Glass-Steagall wall that would insulate the vital retail banking services the economy depends on from Wall Street’s speculative casino, Clinton proposes a “risk fee” on large banks to “discourage the kind of hazardous behavior that could induce another crisis.” The fee would be higher on financial firms that have larger amounts of debt or engage in riskier trading strategies.

[Proserpina]

1. As far as anyone can tell, Hillary doesn't get anything right about economics

She doesn't have a clue. She just tries to co-opt Bernie, and then twist it into the usual self-serving corporate crap.