I think Warren will be the leader in the Senate for the progressives, if not majority leader at some point in the next few years. But even though I’m not voting for him and thinks he’d be a terrible president, I don’t discount the fact that he’s earned millions of votes that mount to over 40% of the voting Democrats in the primary.
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It’s also the automatic response given by people who are advocating for international trade deals – that because the whole economy will be stronger we don’t need to give any thought about disruption to the “losers” in any individual capacity. If you find the explanation unsatisfying in the trade arena (I think it has been incomplete, at best) then you should find it unsatisfying here.
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Let’s try and stay on the ‘response’ to the economy. Do you actually THINK there is something in his tax returns? Give me a break. This is as vacuous and lazy as demanding the transcripts from Hillary’s Wall Street speeches…c’mon.
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“but it’s wrong … to assume that the new owner will be just like the old owner; that they will find a need for certain types of business assets or employees.”
Fair enough, but there’s actually a smaller risk of that in a service industry like banking, where the employees basically are the asset being acquired.
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I’ve always admired Bernie Sanders in the Senate. But that was just fucking painful.
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Well, that was a lot of words to say, “I have no idea.”
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She will likely be the public face of it at least, though i can’t say enough how much i like Al Franken,
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I read the transcript and actually started to laugh! It is clear that Sen. Sanders hasn’t thought out any of the details of one of his key proposals. In many ways he is a mirror image of The Donald. I’m not comparing their character. The Donald is now a vulgar, racist demagogue. Sen. Sanders is a well-meaning progressive. However, neither of them have fleshed out any of the details of their major proposals and their answers to all questions about how they will enact them are basically ‘Trust me. I will get it done’.
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TBTF is an important issue and I’m not denying that. BUT, in the 21st C, there are now adjunct issues that go along with those and you can’t simply stand there and coast on a couple of slogans. One adjunct issue is how do you get banks to focus on the economy of Main Street as opposed to Wall Street even if they’re broken up? How do you force the banks to allow more money into the system as opposed to hoarding it?
I’m not just referring to separating pure banking v. banking/brokerage. I’m certainly in favor of reinstating a 21st C version of Glass-Steagal. Whether that’s enough, I don’t know. But, I would expect that Sanders would go into an interview with more than just vagueries seeing as this has been his jeremiad for what? 20 years…
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And yet…he continues to demand that she release those transcripts, while staying tight lipped about releasing his own transcripts. And yeah, I think those interviews and speeches in Cuba and Nicaragua will have quite an impact upon the electorate.
As far as his taxes, unlike paid speeches, its been standard practice to release full tax forms for numerous years going all the way back to the 60s. Hillary has released theirs all the way back to 1992. Bernie has only released a partial summary for 1 year. If there is nothing to hide, what’s the problem?
My own personal guess is the tax forms will reveal that Bernie’s personal fiances don’t jive with his public rhetoric. And there might also be some uncomfortable questions concerning Jane’s time and departure from Burlington College. But its just guesses. We won’t/can’t know because Bernie continues to refuse to provide them.
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Big thinkers and Big doers are thankfully rare. You wish for them nly as long as their policies mesh with your ideas of progress. One can argue that Ronald Reagan was a big thinker (or had others doing the big thinking fir him) and doer but what he brought to the country in my opinion we could have done without.
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Completely agree with your statement. What most people don’t want to face up to is that decreasing income inequality will almost surely mean slower growth.
The rebuttal is that if almost all income gains are going to the top 1%, then slower growth shouldn’t matter to the bottom 99%.
Your astute analysis suggests why we should care. Fewer jobs.
The employees are assets only to the extent they are carrying out productive activities. The point is that if a certain scale is needed to make the activity productive, a small or moderate sized institution might not do it at all. It would make much more sense to regulate activities, with size coming into play only at the outer edges of policy – that is, to avoid extreme results, whether from an antitrust or taxpayer subsidy perspective.
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Except if the bank in question is global in nature, downsizes those jobs in the form of technology and axes a whole bunch of jobs. Those people are SOL… See Credit Suisse 2015/16.
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But does that mean that no one else would pick up the investment business? Would this simply vanish?
Analogy - if General Motors stopped making trucks, would there be one-third fewer truck assemblers in the labor force, or would they simply find jobs with other truck manufacturers?
Although I don’t have a great sense of what the answer would be, it does seem to me that it would be appropriate to look at what investing in and/or creating “synthetic instruments” actually entails. Because when it comes down to it, many of these are nothing more than bets, and if enough of them pile up, an entire institution can be destabilized. The rationale given for these instruments as a hedge is simply a lie for most purchasers. And since they are “synthetic” you can churn out a virtually unlimited number.
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I have to say that I don’t think any of the senators you mentioned are going to be falling all over Sanders to help him do anything. Their loyalties are to the Democratic Party and their constituents. He has spent his career on the sidelines, his campaign has been based on a house of cards and he is not a team player.
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This is only the beginning of the vetting process that would take place if he were the nominee. It wouldn’t be pretty, imo.
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Personally, I think it depends on what the focus is for the individual bank in question.
For example, if the focus of the bank is to provide maximum return on investment to their shareholders and create more liquidity within their system, then creating these “synthetic instruments” makes sense to them.
Wait, you mean clicking your heels and yelling “Wall Street lobbyists” three times doesn’t constitute an actual plan?
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