President Obama Addresses Bernie Sanders’ Plan To Break Up Big Banks

President Obama recently addressed Bernie Sanders’ plan to break up the big banks in an interview with New York Times Magazine.

Sanders has released a plan to break up the big banks, and many have said it’s within the scope of reason.

Sanders plan would tackle the issue in his first 100 days as president.

“Within the first 100 days of his administration, Sen. Sanders will require the secretary of the Treasury Department to establish a ‘Too-Big-to Fail’ list of commercial banks, shadow banks and insurance companies whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.

“Within a year, the Sanders administration will work with the Federal Reserve and financial regulators to break these institutions up using the authority of Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.”

Sanders would also bring back aspects of the Glass-Steagall banking regulations that were removed by President Bill Clinton, which many have pointed to as part of the reason the economy collapsed.

Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it would be easy or that it’s going to happen without a lot of effort. President Obama said his terms have helped stabilize the economy, but he never set out to break up the big banks.

“It is true that we have not dismantled the financial system, and in that sense, Bernie Sanders’s critique is correct,” Obama said. “But one of the things that I’ve consistently tried to remind myself during the course of my presidency is that the economy is not an abstraction. It’s not something that you can just redesign and break up and put back together again without consequences.”

President Obama also criticized the movie The Big Short, which focuses on the 2008 economic collapse. President Obama felt like the movie ended with a feeling that nothing that caused the collapse was really fixed and that there is still much of the same dangers to the economy.

Bernie Sanders wants to break up the big banks so that they don’t have the power and control that he believes led to the economic collapse. Sanders wants to spread out the investments and capital among many banks, which he believes would make it so the government never has to bail out a gigantic bank (or several) to stop the economy from going completely into ruins.

Sanders has been very critical of the Wall Street bailout, and he’s hoping to avoid the government needing to ever repeat such an act. He has stated several times that the government bailed out the CEOs on Wall Street and left the American public in the dust.

President Obama believes things he set up, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are helping everyday citizens, according to MSNBC.

Though Bernie Sanders is seen as the biggest enemy of Wall Street at the moment, President Obama is still seen as a big enemy to them, depending on who you ask.

The New York Times interview with President Obama features his thoughts on the response to him saying he “did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street” during a 60 Minutes interview in 2009. He said he did not regret saying it, and that it was an “extraordinarily mild” critique.

Around that time, Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the equity firm Blackstone Group, compared Obama to Hitler invading Poland for some of the actions he was taking against Wall Street.

If they were comparing Obama to Hitler back then when breaking up the big banks wasn’t even on the table, we can only imagine what they’d be saying about Bernie Sanders if he was elected president.

[Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images]