was the whole point! Republicans like Newt Gingrich say Trump’s presidency is one more “great effort to break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model” of government. I wonder if Newt is planning to bail out the banks himself next time around.
I don’t love all regulations—no one does—but some problems can be solved only when our government writes and enforces a set of rules. How else are we going to take on fraud, antitrust issues, and a banking industry that has the power to wreck our economy? Look at it this way: if corporations can cheat people or crush their competitors or load up on risks—and if their top executives can stuff their own pockets by leading their corporations in those directions—then sooner or later, one of them will do it. And once one of them cheats, everyone else is caught in a bind—follow the cheater or get left behind? Not every CEO of a giant bank may have wanted to get into the scam-your-customer mortgage business, but once the competitors were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from it, the practice got really hard to resist.
This big, dynamic, very complicated economy of ours needs some basic regulations in place to make sure markets work, and it’s not hard to come up with some straightforward rules that can make an enormous difference.
For starters, we should put in place a modern version of Glass-Steagall and separate plain-vanilla banking like checking accounts and savings accounts from crazy risk-taking on Wall Street. This doesn’t have to be partisan. My first cosponsor for a twenty-first-century Glass-Steagall bill was the Republicans’ 2008 presidential nominee, Senator John McCain. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on this idea, and, at his insistence, adopting Glass-Steagall was added to the Republican platform. But the Republican leadership in the House and the Senate has refused to move any such legislation, and now President Trump has put in place an economic team that is headed in the opposite direction. No one ever offers to explain exactly why giant banks should be able to benefit from government insurance and gamble on Wall Street at the same time, but the bank lobbyists have managed to block this bill from going forward.
Here’s another idea: the SEC should hire a leader who doesn’t work for Wall Street—and it should get a much bigger budget so that the agency can actually go out and enforce the law. There have been some good SEC commissioners who have shown some real courage, and this shouldn’t be partisan either, but the latest nominee to head up the SEC built his entire career by aggressively protecting Wall Street from government regulators. Anyone who thinks he’s suddenly going to get tough on the same people who fed him so well for so many years doesn’t know the chummy Wall Street fraternity.
Oh, and here’s a good one: when CEOs break the law, they ought to go to jail, just like anyone else. The words chiseled in stone above the Supreme Court are EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. This is not followed by EXCEPT FOR CORPORATE EXECUTIVES.
Let’s also put some steel in the spines of our prosecutors and start enforcing antitrust laws again. Small drugstores and start-up airlines and even innovative new approaches to health insurance should get a chance to try out their ideas. I believe in a government that works for the people—not for the giants in the industry—and that government should promote competition every chance it gets. Concentration is bad for consumers and bad for innovators; worst of all, it puts everyone at risk when things really go south.
I understand that not everyone will agree with me on each of these proposals. But let’s be clear: America 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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