This Is Why Wall Street Banks Are Throwing A Hissy Fit Over Elizabeth Warren

Why are big banks waging war against Senator Elizabeth Warren? Because Elizabeth Warren refuses to bow down to them.


Since crashing the economy in 2008, the big banks on Wall Street have gone largely unpunished and have avoided being broken up into smaller pieces. Dodd-Frank instituted some regulations but not enough to prevent a repeat of the financial hole we have been climbing out of over the last seven years.
  
The banks, of course, would rather there not be any regulations at all, which is why they heavily opposed the election of Warren as the next senator from Massachusetts.
When Warren captured victory, she immediately went to work to strengthen regulation and create protections for consumers in an effort to keep banks from being a threat to the economy and the financial well-being of Americans and their families.


That didn’t make banks happy, especially JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who paid a visit to Warren’s office on Capitol Hill in 2013 to argue for less regulation and the gutting of the Consumer Protection Agency.


As Warren recalls in a newly added afterword in the paperback edition of her book “A Fighting Chance,” the dickish Dimon advocated for killing regulations even as his own bank continued to remain in non-compliance of the current laws. When Warren told Dimon to his face that his Wall Street corporation would be in violation of law if a new Consumer Protection Agency director failed to be confirmed by the Senate, Dimon responded by grinning like an asshole and telling Warren to levy a fine against him, because his company could afford to pay it anyway.
Here’s the passage via Huffington Post.

When the conversation turned to financial regulation and Dimon began complaining about all the burdensome rules his bank had to follow, I finally interrupted. I was polite, but definite. No, I didn’t think the biggest banks were overregulated. In fact, I couldn’t believe he was complaining about regulatory constraints less than a year after his bank had lost billions in the infamous London Whale high-risk trading episode. I said I thought the banks were still taking on too much risk and that they seemed to believe the taxpayers would bail them out — again — if something went wrong.

Our exchange heated up quickly. By the time we got to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we weren’t quite shouting, but we were definitely raising our voices. At this point — early in 2013 — Rich Cordray was still serving as director of the consumer agency under a recess appointment; he hadn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate, which meant that the agency was vulnerable to legal challenges over its work. Dimon told me what he thought it would take to get Congress to confirm a director, terms that included gutting the agency’s power to regulate banks like his. By this point I was furious. Dodd-Frank had created default provisions that would automatically go into effect if there was no confirmed director, and his bank was almost certainly not in compliance with the those rules. I told him that if that happened, “I think you guys are breaking the law.”

Suddenly Dimon got quiet. He leaned back and slowly smiled. “So hit me with a fine. We can afford it.”

In short, Warren stood her ground against Dimon and his big bank and has been fighting for tighter regulations ever since so that America doesn’t have to suffer another economic implosion. That’s why Wall Street has declared war against her. She is a force that cannot be bought, and her fight for economic fairness scares the hell out of them. If Warren has her way, the big banks would be broken up into smaller entities that cannot pose a threat to the world economy, and regulations would be put in place to protect consumers from greed and predatory practices. Make no mistake, Wall Street banks still want to have free reign to do whatever they please, and it is clear that banking CEOs are still arrogant and greedy. Warren represents a threat to them because she sides with the people, and for that, she should be in the White House. Just imagine how frightened Wall Street will be when that happens.