Here's another reason for Elizabeth Warren to stay in the Senate beyond the fact she doesn't want to run for president—she can push to finish a job on Wall Street reform that's only half done.
Via Victoria Finkle:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., delivered a sweeping speech Wednesday aimed at what she's calling "the unfinished business of financial reform."
Warren laid out a number of broad policy goals for the banking industry, arguing that while the Dodd-Frank Act "made some real progress," more needs to be done to resurrect a safe financial system...
In addition to calling for a break-up of the megabanks, Warren said policymakers must close a regulatory loophole for auto dealers, punish large firms and their executives more harshly for wrongdoing, reform the tax code and better regulate the shadow banking sector.
This speech sounded similar notes
to the rip-roaring one Warren gave from the Senate floor last December, but here Warren laid out her vision for how to put an end to "too big to fail" financial institutions. She suggested either capping their size altogether or not making government-backed insurance available to investment banks.
"If banks want access to government-provided deposit insurance, they should be limited to boring banking," she said. "If banks want to engage in high-risk trading, they can go for it — but they can't get access to insured deposits and put the taxpayer on the hook for some of that risk. It's that simple."
Putting a wall up between commercial and investment banks is what the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 did until it was repealed in 1999—a move
that many people have blamed for the financial industry meltdown of 2008.