In Fact, Sanders Has a Very Clear Plan on How to Break Up Too-Big-to-Fail Banks
(COMMON DREAMS) Andrea Germanos, April 6, 2016 — 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.”