Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reflected Thursday on the five-year anniversary of the financial crisis, urging lawmakers to take substantive action to downsize “too-big-to-fail” banks.
“Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?” she said in a speech at George Washington Law School, according to her prepared remarks. “I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That’s what oversight means.”
The Massachusetts Democrat said she “didn’t understand the logic” behind Congress’ failure to hold regulatory agencies to rule-making deadlines laid out by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act. As a result, she said the four largest banks in the country have actually grown by 30 percent over the last five years.
Warren touted her proposed revamp of the Glass-Steagall Act as a solution to downsize those Wall Street “behemoths.”
“It would reduce ‘too big’ by dismantling the behemoths, so that big banks would still be big – but not too big to fail or, for that matter, too big
to manage, too big to regulate, too big for trial, or too big for jail,” she said.
“I am confident David can beat Goliath on Too Big to Fail,” she continued. “We just have to pick up the slingshot again.”
