Warren Wants More Wall Street Regulation

A few days ago it was learned that another giant Wall Street bank, JPMorgan Chase, has been playing fast and loose with the money of their depositors -- and they lost about $2 billion. That's not enough to sink the financial giant, but it shows that the Wall Street banks are right back to doing the same thing that triggered the collapse of our economy in 2008. There used to be a law that prevented banks from making risky investments with depositor money (the Glass-Steagall Act), but it was repealed in 1999.

It is now obvious that the repeal of many Wall Street regulations by the Republicans was a bad mistake -- a mistake that was only partly rectified by Obama's new Wall Street regulations. One candidate has spoken out loudly and clearly about the need to re-instate many of the regulations abolished by the Republicans -- especially the Glass-Steagall Act. That candidate is Elizabeth Warren, who is running against Scott Brown for Ted Kennedy's old senate seat in Massachusetts. Here are a few statements about this from Professor Warren:

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 That was originally what the Glass-Steagall Act was about, it was repealed in 1999.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.


I’d like to see some real accountability here. I’d like to see Jamie Dimon, for example, resign from his position as a Class A director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.


Notwithstanding the fact that we are just coming out of this huge crisis, Jamie Dimon has been the one who has led the charge in order to say, nope, no more regulation, fight back against regulation, called the regulation un-American, and resist, tried to put loopholes into the regulation, hire an army of lobbyists. This has really got to stop.


What happened here is not just about JPMorgan Chase, it’s about the kind of attitudes, that the bank should be regulating themselves instead of having real oversight… we have to say as a country, no, the banks cannot regulate themselves. They are financial institutions that run the risk of taking down everyone’s job, run the risk of taking down everyone’s pension, run the risk of taking down the entire economy. And that means it’s appropriate to have some government oversight.

I sincerely hope the people of Massachusetts have the good sense to send Elizabeth Warren to the U.S. Senate -- and keep her there for a long time.