But Team Sanders downplayed that on Tuesday.
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Despite Sanders being comfortable talking about Wall Street, Clinton has not shied away from hitting the Vermont senator on the issue, touting herself as someone with a record of taking on the industry.
The divide: Though Clinton and Sanders are vying to convince progressive voters of their tough-on-Wall Street bona fides, Sanders’ speech highlighted the persistent divisions in their respective approaches to the financial sector. “Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks will not be represented in my administration”, Mr. Sanders said on Tuesday.
“Not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy”, said Sanders.
Hundreds attended the Sanders event yesterday, including City Councilmember Rafael Espinal and state senators Bill Perkins and James Sanders.
“So, to those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear”, he continued.
According to Mr. Sanders, Mrs. Clinton was “wrong” while she opposed his plan to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall Act. These corporations would be broken up by the end of the year.
“If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust-buster, were alive today, he would say ‘break ’em up.’ And he would be right”, Mr. Sanders said, again calling for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, a law repealed by the Clinton White House that kept a wall between commercial and investment banking.
The senator proposed caps on ATM fees and credit-card interest rates-saying “big banks need to stop acting like loan sharks and start acting like responsible lenders”-and pledged to establish “a national usury law” that would crack down on abusive practices”.
Sanders has been a vocal critic of the way Wall Street operates and an ardent supporter of other politicians who want to reform America’s financial system.
“Will Wall Street like me?”
President Obama, under whose administration the richest 1 percent has captured 95 percent of all income gains, was mentioned only once, when Sanders singled him out for praise for “improving this economy”.
Sanders is a self-identified “democratic socialist” and recently explained his ideology in a campaign speech.
Bermie Sanders has a message for Wall Street. “Within one year”, he announced, “my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy”.
The distinction between Sanders’ plan to break up the banks, and reining in shadow banking, is nonsensical, as “many so-called banks are in fact deeply involved in shadow banking activities”.
This caveat confirms that his proposal is entirely unserious. Out of the $77.5 million Clinton’s campaign raised in the first six months of her campaign, $2 million – or just less than 3 percent – came from Wall Street.
Though Sanders has long stressed that his version of “democratic socialism” should not be seen as wanting to nationalise industries, he also pledged to turn multibillion-dollar credit rating agencies such as Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch into not-for-profit institutions that would have exclusive power to assess the health of corporate debt. But there are also many financial experts who agree with Mr. Sanders and believe that the only way to ensure that large banks can be truly free from bailouts is to ensure that investment banking activities are kept completely separate from taxpayer-insured deposits.
More than a third of these top financial executives said they have personally witnessed or otherwise had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace. Sanders dismissed her proposals as being only about new fees and regulations.
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Though it featured much of the same populist rhetoric as Sanders’ usual stump speech, the senator incorporated a few more pieces of applause-ready zingers into his normal routine. However, Bloomberg News reported in 2013 that in negotiations over derivatives rules, Gensler ultimately “softened his demands” and forged a compromise with European officials that meant “American banks will be able to sell derivatives overseas without direct US scrutiny”.
