The Effects Of Elizabeth Warren On The Banking Industry

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Elizabeth Warren faced elite democracy when she was trying to form an agency to monitor financial products, and she succeeded in creating a grass-roots movement to truly protect the American people form the banking industry. The banking industry hurt the U.S. economy by hiding small print in financial contracts that cost many individuals and families by tricking them into large payments that they had not accounted for. Banks quickly learned that they could profit from tricking and trapping the American people, and began to make a majority of their financial gains from these policies . The best part about these policies was that they were completely legal. Warren puts it best, “Despite their name, financial products were not treated like products. …show more content…

She believed that banks feared that this agency would engage in price fixing, stop innovation, and put banks out of business . Warren defends that this agency would only enlighten the consumers so that they would be aware of the risks that they were taking, so that they could make the decisions on their own behalf. In this way, the agency is not controlling the banks in anyway, and all of the objections from the opposition that were previously listed are not valid. The banking industry did not agree with this argument and viewed it as a threat to their existence and expansion of government control , so they waged a full on war with financial reform advocates in an attempt to kill the …show more content…

Her strategy was to argue that this agency was a visible change that the American people could understand. Most congressmen wanted to focus on specific policies because they might be easier to negotiate. Warren counteracted this argument by stating that most Americans did not understand the benefit of, “focusing on the rules covering derivatives, capital reserve requirements, and so forth .” As for convincing the president, Obama was always a supporter of the agency. This was evident when the agency was included in the presidential financial reform package as well as when Obama sent one of his pens and a letter following the signing of the Dodd-Frank Act to Elizabeth Warren

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