Elizabeth Warren Calls For Breaking Up The Nation’s Big Banks (Video)
While I do not agree with reinstating Glass-Steagall wholesale, putting a legal wall between commercial banks and investment banks is probably the only solution to the problem of how to break up the Too-Big-To-Fail banks short of nationalizing them.
Q: You think had it [the Volcker rule] been in place, we wouldn’t be talking about this?
WARREN: Well, I’m going to put it this way. The Volcker Rule would help. We don’t know exactly the nature of these trades. But if the question is is the Volcker rule enough, or do we need more, look, I’m somebody who believes we really should have boring banking. That banking should be — the part that’s about savings accounts and checking accounts and our money system — should be separated from the kind of risk-taking that Wall Street traders want to take. That was originally what the Glass-Steagall Act was about, it was repealed in 1999. There was an effort to get it into Dodd-Frank in the 2010 bill. That effort failed. I think we really do need that kind of separation. We need to go back to boring banking. The people who want to take risks need to take risks with their own money and do it somewhere else.
Via ThinkProgress