The Number One Goal: Less Power for the Big Banks

At a retreat this last weekend sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute on financial reform issues (I have to take a break from health care every once in a while to keep my sanity), I met a very impressive guy named Bill Black, who as a regulator was a major reason why the Savings and Loan fraud of the 1980s got discovered and prosecuted. When I got home, I discovered this incredibly smart piece Bill just posted, along with another terrific piece, this one by Bob Creamer, posted earlier that day. Everybody who wants to know how important the battle for financial reform is should real these posts.

The bottom line for me of these articles is that there should be one central goal that drives all policy and legal initiatives for progressives in the coming fights over financial policy- that the biggest banks on Wall Street should have less economic and political power. These companies are already responsible for wrecking our economy, not just in the big economic collapse of last year but in all the ways Black describes regarding the impact on the real economy. If left unchecked, they will continue to drain jobs and income from the rest of the economy, and they will--sooner rather than later, within a few years not a generation or two--cause another major economic collapse, this one almost certainly worse than 2009 because our economy has already been so weakened.