Following suggestions that he somehow “bungled” when asked about how he would, if elected president, break up Wall Street’s largest and most dangerous institutions, the Bernie Sanders campaign on Tuesday offered a detailed explanation of how he would end “too-big-to-fail banks.”
Sparking corporate media’s “great feeding frenzy” was an interview the presidential candidate had April 1 with the New York Daily News editorial board, the transcript of which was published online Monday.
The Washington Post described it as “pretty close to a disaster,” while Jeremy Stahl wrote at Slate that Sanders “appeared to struggle” on the details of how to break up the big banks.
Hillary Clinton also seized on the interview, sending the transcript to supporters in a fundraising email that stated: “even on his signature issue of breaking up the banks, he’s unable to answer basic questions about how he’d go about doing it.” She also told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday, “The core of his campaign has been breaking up the banks, and it didn’t seem in reading his answers that he would understand exactly how that would work under Dodd-Frank.”
But as New York Times finance and business reporter Peter Eavis argued, “taken as a whole, Mr. Sanders’s answers seem to make sense. Crucially, his answers mostly track with a reasonably straightforward breakup plan that he introduced to Congress last year.”
Sanders told the Daily News, “How you go about [breaking up the dangerously large institutions] 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,” later adding that it’d be the banks’ decision “how they want to reconfigure themselves.”
“You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up,” he said.
His campaign on Tuesday released a statement on how a Sanders administration would take on the issue, also stating that he and rival Clinton “have very different points of view on how to reform Wall Street and the largest financial institutions in this country.” The statement reads, in part:
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