Bernie's "Greed is not good" statement strikes a nerve in the Clinton Camp

As the recently released movie The Big Short highlights the crooked and fraudulent banking in the U.S. riles many of us Americans, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ stand is clear:

Sanders said, countering the famed Wall Street move character Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street. “In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the very fabric of our nation.”

This does not sit well with Hillary’s people, who feel the need to tread lightly, when it comes to their Wall Street Supporters:

Before the plan was even released, the Clinton campaign was worried. Clinton’s reform proposal, released online in October, had many positive elements including a limited tax on high speed traders, a risk fee on the biggest banks and greater transparency in the derivatives markets, but it did not go much further than the reforms contained in the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill. It said nothing about restoring Glass-Steagall and did not call for the break up of the nation’s dangerous megabanks, whose very size and complexity could bring down the U.S. economy. 

“Too big to fail” is just plain “TOO BIG.”

This puts Clinton out-of-step with respected reform advocates like Americans for Financial Reform. So before Sanders even rolled out his plan in New York on Tuesday, former CFTC Chair and Clinton advisor Gary Gensler issued a statement slamming it and urging Sanders to “go beyond his existing plans” to break up too-big-to-fail banks and endorse a “risk-based approach that also deals with non-bank financial institutions."

Clinton’s mealymouthed reaction to Bernie’s reform plans: 

Clinton objects to the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act on the grounds that the 1935 legislation doesn’t address the modern “shadow banking system,” and players like Lehman and AIG. (For a great primer on what shadow banking means, see this piece by Vermont Law Professor Jennifer Taub.)

But this is nonsense, say experts.

“It’s “a bit like objecting to the iPhone 6s because your flip phone had inadequate functionality,” says Cornell Law Professor Robert Hockett in the Hill.  “The updated Glass-Steagall proposals pushed by Sanders, Warren, McCain and others is a 21st-century Glass-Steagall, designed to end or to regulate today's shadow banking and conglomeration just as the original Glass-Steagall ended the last century's shadow banking and conglomeration.”

“Too big to fail?

My ass.

"The truth is that 'shadow banking' is and always has been deeply entangled with the major 'too-big-to-fail' dealer banks that dominate Wall Street," said Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform. "During the financial crisis, securitizations and other forms of 'shadow banking' benefited from all kinds of implicit and explicit guarantees by the major dealer banks. The major reason that the financial disruptions created by the crisis spread to the giant banks at the center of the economy, like Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America is because these banks were connected to shadow banking in all kinds of ways."

Bernie’s plan is “right on the money”—so to speak:

Sanders plan tackles the “shadow banking system” in a variety of ways by putting these entities on the list of “too-big-to-fail” institutions that may need to be broken up, by advocating for a modern Glass-Stegall and by implementing a financial transaction tax to tamp down on reckless trading.