Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders will pledge Tuesday that if elected president he would act within his first year to break up banks deemed “too big to fail.”
The promise is included in a speech that the Vermont senator is scheduled to deliver in Manhattan on Wall Street reform, one of the pillars of his upstart campaign for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton.
In the address, Sanders plans to assert that “a handful of huge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country.”
“If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” Sanders will say, according to excerpts released by his campaign. “When it comes to Wall Street reform, that must be our bottom line.”
As he has on the campaign trail, Sanders will also call for the reinstatement of a modern Glass-Steagall Act to separate commercial banking, investment banking and insurance services. Critics have argued that the law’s repeal in 1999 under President Bill Clinton contributed to the global credit crisis.
.. In his speech on Tuesday, Sanders will call for “a banking system that is part of the productive economy, making loans at affordable rates to small- and medium-sized businesses so that we create decent-paying jobs.”