The House GOP’s Hypocrisy on ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’
Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned that, five years after the financial crisis, the biggest Wall Street banks are still so large and loosely regulated that their failure would endanger the entire financial system, forcing the government to bail them out. This problem—called too-big-to-fail—is worse now than it was in 2007, Warren said, because the four largest banks are 30 percent bigger than they were before the financial crisis. House Republicans have made common cause with Warren on the issue—at least rhetorically. But when it comes to proposing a solution, GOPers in the House are MIA; in fact, they’ve pushed bills that would preserve bank bailouts.
Since Republicans took over the House in 2010, the House financial services committee has held six hearings on how the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act may not have ended too-big-to-fail.
In March, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), the chairman of the committee, told the Wall Street Journal that he would doggedly work to prevent more big bank bailouts. The article was titled “Texan’s Plans Put Wall Street on Edge.”