Sanders bank plans too vague to succeed [View all]
On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders had lunch at the Chieftain, a cozy pub near the San Francisco Chronicle. In days gone by, it served as a lunch spot for parched journalists. Earlier, Sanders had addressed a rally in San Jose; he had another scheduled in Vallejo, California, that night. When he exited the Chieftain by a back door onto Howard Street, passers-by shouted out his name.
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At the Chronicle editorial board this month, Sanders was personable, but he was disappointing on substance. And it had happened before.
On April 1, Sanders met with the New York Daily News editorial board. He stumbled over questions about how he would break up the big banks. “How you go about doing it is having legislation passed or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail,” he answered. Probed further, Sanders said he didn’t know whether the Federal Reserve has the authority to break up the banks, but he thought the administration “can have” that power. In other words, he had given little thought to the mechanics and had no plan to execute his big dream. He failed to demonstrate even the slightest understanding as to which agencies have the authority to do what he wants done or how a bank breakup might affect the economy of (say, just for the sake of argument) New York.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza described the meeting as “pretty close to a disaster,” with “the Daily News pressing Sanders for specifics and asking him to evaluate the consequences of his proposals, and Sanders, largely, dodging as he sought to scramble back to his talking points.”
By the time Sanders made it to San Francisco, he was on notice that editorial boards expect more thoughtful answers. He had more than a month to bone up on his signature issue. But when the Chronicle’s business editor, Owen Thomas, asked Sanders whether he would break up Wells Fargo, Sanders said he could not answer definitively. He moved to his talking points — “three out of four of the largest banks today are bigger than they were when we bailed them out because they were too big to fail” — railing against the revolving door. He asserted that Section 121 of Dodd-Frank gives the treasury secretary the power to “determine which banks, if they failed, could cause systemic damage to our economy” and that he “would break them up.” But according to Fortune magazine, that provision gives that authority to a large board on which the treasury secretary sits.
Maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t a man who has been railing against the big banks from sea to shining sea know which banks are so big that he would have to sic the government on them to pare them down to size? Sanders boasted that he would not name a treasury secretary who has worked at Goldman Sachs. The question is: Would he appoint someone who understands how Goldman Sachs works?
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20160524/OPINION04/160529627
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