Characterizing Wall Street as an industry run on “greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance,” Democratic US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders pledged to break up the country’s biggest financial firms within a year and limit banking fees placed on consumers should he become president, in a fiery speech on Tuesday.
He coupled that promise, delivered in front of a raucous crowd just a few subway stops from Wall Street, with a series of attacks on rival Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying that her personal and political ties make her unable to truly take on the financial industry.
“To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear: Greed is not good,” said Sanders, in a reference to Oliver Stone’s 1980s film, Wall Street.
Photo: AFP
“If Wall Street does not end its greed, we will end it for them,” he said, as a cheering audience jumped to its feet.
Sanders has made regulating Wall Street a focus of his primary bid, with calls to curb the political influence of “millionaires and billionaires” at the core of his message. However, the attacks on Clinton marked an escalation in his offensive against the Democratic front-runner.
Clinton’s policies, he said, would do little more than “impose a few more fees and regulations.”
“My opponent says that, as a senator, she told bankers to ‘cut it out’ and end their destructive behavior,” he said, to laughter.
“But, in my view, establishment politicians are the ones who need to cut it out,” he said.
Clinton responded at a campaign event in Iowa, on Tuesday evening, saying that her policies would take on a wide range of financial actors, including insurance companies and investment houses that helped spark the 2008 recession.
“I have a broader, more comprehensive set of policies about everything, including taking on Wall Street,” she said. “I want to go after everybody who poses a risk to our financial system.”
Clinton and her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, have made tens of millions in speaking fees from addresses to Wall Street banks, insurance companies and other financial firms — a fact Sanders alluded to in his speech, saying the banks give “very generous speaking fees to those who go before them.”
She also opposes reinstating the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which effectively limited the size of financial companies by prohibiting commercial banks from engaging in investment banking activities. Sanders would re-establish the law, initially repealed during the Clinton administration.
Many economists question whether that law would have prevented the crisis, given that many financial institutions that failed, including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, were investment banks and their failure would not have been prevented by Glass-Steagall.
Sanders vowed to create a “too-big-to-fail” list of companies within the first 100 days of his administration whose failure would pose a grave risk to the US economy without a taxpayer bailout. Those firms would be forced to reorganize within a year.
Sanders also said he wants to cap ATM fees at US$2 and cap interest rates on credit cards and consumer loans at 15 percent. He also promised to take a tougher tact against industry abuses, saying that major financial institutions have been fined only US$204 billion since 2009.
He also promised to restructure credit rating agencies and the US Federal Reserve, so bankers cannot serve on the body’s board.
“The reality is that fraud is the business model on Wall Street,” he said. “It is not the exception to the rule. It is the rule.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion