Public Banking Institute: Candidly Assessing Sanders on Banks

[eridani]

http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/candidly_assessing_sanders_on_banks

Spoiler: Although any road ahead on bank reform is a long, frustrating slog, and while no good reform will stay good in the watering down and game-the-bill stages of the policymaking process, voters this year actually have some interesting competing proposals in the Democratic primary race. But those proposals will ultimately be meaningless without grassroots efforts to continue the push for public banks (with other economic sustainability measures), and against neoliberal trade agreements—that goes for Sanders’s proposals, which both assume an ease of change we haven’t seen evidence of in the beltway, and ignore the candidate’s own history of supporting public banks, or at least the Bank of North Dakota. This ultimately means something most readers of this blog already know: It’s our job, not a presidential candidate’s job, to create public banks in our cities and states. We need to keep doing that no matter who is elected.

When a Daily News interview with Bernie Sanders was published last week, a lot of silly messaging occurred about Sanders's unclear or seemingly light answers on breaking up the banks. But it’s rather absurd to suggest from that awkward interview that Sanders doesn't know how to break up big banks--his competence is recognized by any halfway educated commentator across a variety of publications.

Mike Konczal of the Next New Deal project, writing for Salon, offers perhaps the best refutation. Sanders accurately (if simplistically, because he’s talking to the staff of the Daily News), describes possible ways to break up big banks. As I indicated last week, even Hillary Clinton has a proposal to partially and incrementally achieve such a breakup—through “risk fees,” the one really interesting, substantive, and unique piece of Clinton’s bank policy package. Sanders can do what he describes in three possible ways, as Konczal points out:

cap the balance sheet of banks;
have the FSOC (Financial Stability Oversight Council) declare the largets banks to be too risky; or
have the Federal Reserve and FDIC declare the "living wills" of banks not credible

“The second two work through Dodd-Frank,” he writes, “the first would work through Congress.”

[Admiral Loinpresser]

1. The only awkward thing about the NYDN interview was the ignorance of the interviewer.

This is another MEDIA SCANDAL, like the false assertion by AP that Al Gore said he invented the Internet. Just another day at the office, lying about Bernie Sanders. We must educate people about this Media Whore narrative. Thom Hartmann exposes the lying "journalists" for what they are: Shillaries.