This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save Working People. Elizabeth Warren
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has been warned, first with the S&L crisis in the 1980s and then with the crash of 2008. We survived, but that last financial bomb was nearly fatal for our economy—and for tens of millions of American families. We can’t afford another hit.
And the risk is still there. As one top economic commentator pointed out recently, “Since 2010, there have been major scandals at banks on nearly every continent for every reason: malfeasance, incompetence, complacency.” In 2016 alone—eight years after the financial crash and even after tougher regulations were put in place—three major banks got into serious trouble. Deutsche Bank hid so much risk on its books that the International Monetary Fund said it posed a substantial threat to the global financial system. Wells Fargo was caught pumping up its stock price by cheating more than two million customers. And Citigroup agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for manipulative practices that gave it an illegal advantage in trades.
Meanwhile, banks are still Too Big to Fail. Actually, some are bigger than ever, or So Big We Can’t Let Them Stub Their Little Toesies. The Federal Reserve Bank and the FDIC recently announced that Wells Fargo was so large and so badly managed that if that bank alone started to stumble, it could drag the whole economy down with it—unless, of course, it got a bailout. In a long academic paper, a former Treasury secretary and an economist analyzed volumes of financial data about banks. Their conclusion: in 2016, the big banks are not significantly safer than they were just before the crash in 2008—in fact, they may be even riskier. The financial crisis is long past, yet the banking sector is still loaded with corporations that could blow up the economy? Good grief. We need stronger rules, not weaker ones.
This stuff is serious—serious as a heart attack. The big banks put all of us at risk, and it’s the kind of risk familiar to my grandparents: it’s lose-your-house, lose-your-job, lose-all-your-savings risk. Giant corporations that jack up their prices or run over their competitors may not cause our economy to explode, but they squeeze us in so many ways that they’re capable of causing a long, slow decline, one that could become irreversible.
Every problem is made worse by the fact that the world in which these giant banks and corporations operate is getting faster and more complex every day. A debt crisis in Greece or Hong Kong can have ripple effects that influence lives in small towns in Ohio or Alaska. Republicans may want to look the other way, they may continue to make their mindless demand for smaller government, and they may pretend that helping giant corporations will always help America’s working families. But this is a fiction we can no longer afford.
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