Top Wall Street critic Sen. Elizabeth Warren returned fire on a top banker, suggesting that the finance industry doesn’t like her because she understands how they earn their profits.
“The problem is not that I don’t understand the global banking system,” the Massachusetts senator said in an interview with the Huffington Post taped Thursday night and published Friday. “The problem for these guys is that I fully understand the system and I understand how they make their money. And that’s what they don’t like about me.”
Warren was responding to the suggestion made by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon earlier in the week that she did not understand the global banking system.
Since taking office in 2013, Warren has engaged in several high-profile legislative campaigns for tougher financial regulation and other efforts to combat what she has described as Wall Street’s undue influence in Washington. Before entering office, Warren was a regulator and a law professor at Harvard University.
While the Democratic senator said that she did understand banking, she also explained that the complexity of the financial system makes it harder for regulators to prevent banks from tricking customers, and in turn necessitates complicated regulations.
“Regulators are always two steps behind trying to figure it out,” Warren said of complex bank practices and new financial products.
Banking should be simpler to protect customers, Warren said. A financial architecture in which less was done by banks that receive federal deposit insurance also would make regulation less onerous for banks, she argued.
“Hey, listen guys, there’s a way to fix that. If banking is boring, the regulatory part can be boring too,” Warren told the Huffington Post podcast hosts. “You want to go out there and take on risks? OK. Go do it. But don’t do it within the structure of a bank that gets backed up by the federal government.”
