I’m down in Washington, D.C., at the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Finance & Society conference, at which, as I pointed out yesterday, all of the speakers are women. At the opening dinner last night, Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered a rousing condemnation of the big banks that, to me, at least, sounded suspiciously like a stump speech. “Financial institutions shouldn’t be allowed to cheat people,” she said at one point. “Can I have an amen on that?”
She could. But this wasn’t an Occupy Wall Street reunion. The audience was largely made up of well-heeled Washingtonians in expensive dresses and suits, a good number of whom cheered. Warren, who, as we all know, isn’t running for President, went on to outline a number of proposals for reform that would go beyond the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was Washington’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. “Let’s get real. Dodd-Frank did not end too-big-to-fail,” she noted, correctly. What was needed was to “end it once and for all.”
“How?” she asked. “By breaking up the big banks—just break them up.”
When I say that it sounded like a stump speech, I’m not criticizing. To the contrary. The Massachusetts senator brings an infectious passion and energy to her issues. She is also able to cut to the essence of complicated subjects, and to expand the political debate to include proposals that many other politicians regard as verboten, such as cutting the megabanks down to size, extending the remit of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which was her baby), and introducing a transactions tax on short-term trades. Some of her ideas may be questionable. For example, quite a few people who sympathize with her over-all approach aren’t convinced that bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act—which separated commercial banks from investment banks, among other things—is the right solution to Wall Street’s excesses. But, in a town that is still largely beholden to financial-industry lobbyists, she is an essential presence.
After listening to Warren speak, I have no reason to doubt that she was being sincere when she said, just over a month ago, that Hillary Clinton deserves a chance to lay out her program. But I’m pretty sure that Warren also meant it when she told my colleague Ryan Lizza that she expects to have an impact on the political debate and the 2016 election. If Clinton doesn’t demonstrate, with some detailed proposals, that she has left behind for good the light-handed approach to financial regulation associated with her husband’s Administration, she can certainly expect Warren to make her displeasure public.
What form would that expression of displeasure take? It’s too early to speculate. (On a mischievous note, I can’t resist pointing out that, as I write this, the lead story on Politico carries the headline “Warren Met Privately With ‘Draft Warren’ Supporters.”) But the onus is on Clinton, once she completes her “listening tour,” to put together an actual policy platform. Does she support the idea of breaking up the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America? Is imposing transaction taxes on high-frequency traders and other short-term speculators a good idea? Should the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have the power to regulate the auto-loan industry? Warren, and many others, are waiting for answers.
