Video: Bernie Sanders introduces Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Exist Act

Published on Oct 3, 2018

Excerpt:

On the 10th anniversary of the Wall Street bailout, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation to break up the nation’s biggest banks and risky financial institutions in order to safeguard the economy and prevent another costly taxpayer bailout. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) will introduce a companion bill in the House.

Today the six largest banks in America control assets equivalent to more than half the country’s GDP and the four largest banks are on average about 80 percent larger today than they were before the bailout. The legislation introduced Wednesday would cap the size of the largest financial institutions so that a company’s total exposure is no more than 3 percent of GDP, about $584 billion today.

By applying a cap on the size of financial institutions, the bill would break up the six largest banks in the country: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The bill would also address large non-bank financial service companies such ase Prudential, MetLife and AIG.

“No financial institution should be so large that its failure would cause catastrophic risk to millions of Americans or to our nation’s economic well being,” Sanders said. “We must end, once and for all, the scheme that is nothing more than a free insurance policy for Wall Street: the policy of ‘too big to fail.’”

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/