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July 09, 2015 at 09:26 AM
Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley issued a 10-page manifesto Thursday promising tougher regulations on Wall Street to help prevent another financial crash, including instituting a “revolving door” ban at regulatory agencies as well as requiring the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement director to be a presidential nominee and doubling the agency’s budget.
O’Malley writes in his paper, “Protecting the American Dream from Another Wall Street Crash,” that both the SEC and Department of Justice “have fallen down on the job of enforcement — sending a message to Wall Street that they are ‘too big to jail.’”
Stronger enforcement against Wall Street, O’Malley writes, can be achieved by “appointing people to key positions who will take financial regulation seriously.”
O’Malley also said he’d introduce Glass-Steagall Act-like legislation to separate commercial banking from investment banking, as the Volcker Rule, “sometimes referred to as ‘Glass-Steagall Lite,’ is excessively complex, providing too many opportunities for banks to exploit loopholes and ambiguities.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., reintroduced Tuesday her 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act to rein in banks’ risky behaviors by reinstating certain Glass-Steagall Act protections that were repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
The former Maryland governor maintains that the DOJ and SEC have been “over-reliant on financial settlements for institutions that break the law. Settlements, even those in the billions of dollars, are not appropriate deterrents for institutions with trillions of dollars of assets.”
