This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders

[JaneyVee]

Bernie Sanders sat down with the New York Daily News editorial board on Monday, seeking their endorsement in the upcoming April 19 Empire State primary. It did not go well for the senator from Vermont.

Time and again, when pressed to get beyond his rhetoric on the evils of corporate America and Wall Street, Sanders struggled. Often mightily. (The Daily News published the full transcript of the interview so you can check it out for yourself.)

The rest:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/05/this-new-york-daily-news-interview-was-pretty-close-to-a-disaster-for-bernie-sanders/?postshare=421459880180552&tid=ss_tw

[hrmjustin]

1. Sanders is not ready to be president.

[MADem]

4. That was a NIGHTMARE for him--he doesn't have a grasp on many issues, and it shows.

"I don't know" is not the way you go into an interview where he should expect these questions.

[hrmjustin]

7. He lost Connecticut with that answer on Newtown.

He is going to lode the tri-state area.

[Armstead]

8. What's he supposed to do go in like Clinton and make up stuff?

[MADem]

9. Excuse me. He should have been prepared for those questions.

I think he thought he was going to get questions like: "So how should we describe you, Bernie? Cool, or coolest?"

He has no FP chops, and it shows.

[Andy823]

38. He has gotten away with

Changing the subject back to his standard stump speech so often he thought he could get away with it again. Guess he was wrong.

Bernie has not been vetted, and if he wins the election, the republicans will destroy him when he tries to pull that. You can bet that they have a book full of things they can use on him. Not releasing his taxes will also hurt him and Jane's "charitable family trust fund" tucked away in the Caribbean is going to be front and center in any debate he has with Trump or Cruz.

This interview was nothing compared to what will come later should he win.

[Hortensis]

53. Bernie's ignorance of his main issue is shocking,

frankly astonishing. Sure, experts have said all along that his plan could not be enacted without a tsunami of political support swept him and Democrats into office, and even then only parts of it.

It never occurred to me that Sanders himself had no idea how he would do it.

I've been saying I'd vote for him comfortably enough if he won the nomination, but -- who is this man? What else is he clueless about? I've lost my comfort in having 2 viable candidates.

[jonestonesusa]

60. Before believing the OPs assessment, objective parties should definitely read the interview.

The interview itself is lengthy, nuanced, and doesn't particularly lend itself to the kind of cherry picked summary that this pro-Clinton crowd favors. Don't believe the WaPo hype and read the whole piece is my suggestion. Who would expect the New York papers to welcome anti-Wall Street policies? Of course they're going to grill him on the details of banking anti-trust actions, and Sanders isn't the type to say "I will study the issue." So, any answer of "I don't know" will excite the anti-Sanders partisans in a primary race.

[MADem]

65. When he started yammering--and that IS what he was doing, yammering--about IRAN and KSA

"working together" in the ME on the problems of violence, terrorism, Syria, etc. in response to one of the debate questions a while back, I got that "break out in a cold sweat" feeling about him.

I realized that his knowledge base about the region is less than that of Donald Trump. It reminded me of George W. Bush, who "didn't know there was more than one Kind-o-Islam."

Congress is not going to give him his "Free Stuff" agenda, and he's CLUELESS when it comes to international affairs. I mean...shit! That is frightening. And that whole "Oh well, he can hire people with expertise" argument? Yeah, that worked out real well for GWB in Iraq....

They even thought a new flag would go over well, a flag that has the colors of Israel included in it! The Onion had a blast with this boneheaded design:

[iAZZZo]

23. secretary clinton clearly grasps the issue(s)

[font size="14" face="Times"]"we came, we saw, he died......"[/font]

[840high]

30. .that^ X100

[MADem]

67. Did you get that from Town Hall, or Hot Air?

You're going to be very unhappy in the months ahead--enjoy your right wing themes while you can.

[cwydro]

5. I even like Sanders, but there is simply no way he can win a GE in this country.

No way.

That might be a bad thing to say about our country, but that's just a fact.

[nichomachus]

28. We don't pay any attention to the Daily News

Hillary supporters told me so.

[peggysue2]

31. Disaster is too kind

To say this interview was a disaster is wa-a-ay too kind. What is revealed is that when it comes to policy, St Bernard is found wanting, even when the subject is in his wheelhouse: Wall St, Wall St, Wall St.

Sorry, this does not make the grade and underscores the difference between a wish list and an actual platform. Because it's easier to make promises than to find solutions (or even know how to find them).

Let the vetting (and blood-letting) begin! A number of publications have picked this doozy up including the Atlantic and Vanity Fair.

If St. Bernard thought this was a good way to re-introduce himself to New Yorkers, think again. You can't fake competence.

[Jefferson23]

2. Yes, check it out, it is irrational to frame it as Bernie is poorly informed.

Sanders vs. Clinton on Wall St. Reform

Former financial regulator Bill Black and Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal take on the policies of the two contenders for the Democratic nomination

biography

William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.

Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, works on financial reform, structural unemployment, consumer access to financial services, and inequality. He blogs for New Deal 2.0 and the Rortybomb, and his work has appeared at The Atlantic Monthly's Business Channel, NPR's Planet Money, the Baseline Scenario, Huffington Post, and The Nation. He was formerly a financial engineer and mathematical analyst. Konczal holds a MS in Finance and a BS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

transcript

Sanders vs. Clinton on Wall St. Reform

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: But joining me now, first of all, in Bloomington, Minnesota. Bill Black is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He's a white-collar criminologist, a former financial regulator, and author of the book that has one of the best titles I ever heard: The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. And he's also a founding member of the Bank Whistleblowers United, and he'll get a chance to talk about that in a second. Also joining us from Washington, DC is Mike Konczal. He's a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, where he works on financial reform, unemployment, inequality, and a progressive vision of the economy. Thanks very much for joining us, Mike.

Bill, let's start with you. There's been a lot of debate about financial reform between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Compare the Clinton plan to the Sanders plan, in terms of reining in Wall Street. They both essentially say they want to rein in the excesses of capitalism, and Wall Street is the epitome of excesses of capitalism. So how do you compare the way that each of them might rein it in?

BILL BLACK: Okay, so first, there's, in the econ biz, we talk about revealed preferences. And clearly the revealed preference is that Wall Street hates Bernie's plan and doesn't view Hillary's plan as a threat. They've said that in repeated global financial publications, and you've seen that in their contributions and news stories out on Bloomberg today, for example, about this.

It is true that the Sanders plan is more aggressive on two critical matters. One is the so-called too big to fail, the systemically dangerous institutions, and the other is restoring Glass-Steagall, which a prior guest talked about some. But both the Sanders and the Clinton plans, in terms of Hillary's description of, the vision of life, both of them are actually poetry instead of prose. Most of what they've written can't be implemented without new legislation, and they all know they're not going to get that new legislation.

So what we did, we're a bunch of experienced folks from banking and regulation who, you know, got in trouble because we told the truth, and are unemployable in banking and finance, was create a very detailed series of plans that could be implemented without any new legislation and without any new rule making. You could, for example--.

JAY: Bill, just let me interrupt you for a second. This is something a president could do by executive order if the president wanted to? Or--.

BLACK: Not by executive order, but the regulatory appointees could do this without any new rules. And I can announce somebody in your locale, the first politician has agreed to pledge to support implementation of this plan in full, and the contribution limits, and it's Margaret Flowers. And she is the candidate for the Green nomination for the U.S. Senate for Maryland.

JAY: Okay. So, so in other words, this counters the argument that nothing can be done because of the current Congress, because you're saying a lot could be done because of the kind of people you would appoint to head the agencies that would actually implement existing law that right now doesn't get implemented so seriously. Is that, am I getting it correctly?

BLACK: Right. We have deliberately crafted it so that it can be done without new legislation and without new rules, and it's quite detailed. You can see about 25 pages that spell out the specific implementation steps to do it.

So you know, nobody, we're economists and bankers and such. Nobody ever accused us of having the capability for poetry. So it's all prose.

JAY: Mike, you wrote an article in the Nation where you talked about Sanders' proposal to break up the big banks, but that it doesn't really go far enough, that a lot more has to be done on the regulatory side, in terms of regulatory changes. And in fact, you were suggesting that Clinton regulatory changes actually could be more effective than simply breaking up big banks, that I guess what you want to see is Sanders and Clinton campaigns, are promises combined. Explain, explain that. And I wonder--go ahead.

KONCZAL: Sure. So as, as Bill described, this is a world, as opposed to some things like healthcare, where the priorities a president has can make a really big difference. Who their treasury secretary, who they appoint to the Federal Reserve, what kind of mandates they have. And it's specifically how they diagnose what the problem is will have a real difference. So these things are really important, even if Congress remains very polarized and very divided.

I think a quick way to summarize their differences is Bernie Sanders is really looking to the biggest institutions, where Hillary is tending to look a little bit more at the activities. So Bernie Sanders wants to take the biggest banks, the biggest institutions, especially the six biggest, and essentially break them up, both in terms of their business lines, like Glass-Steagall, and their size, in terms of size caps.

Hillary Clinton's focused a lot more on activities. Things that are called shadow banking. But essentially the idea that a lot of firms can get in trouble with the problems of banking, and thus need a certain kind of credential regulation that historically they haven't had. She's also talking a lot about something called short-termism, or just the kind of pressure finance puts on the real economy to put more money into shareholder payouts and dividends, and stockholders, as opposed to real investment and workers.

Let's be charitable and say Hillary Clinton's plans on those second two things are a good first step. What I would love to see is Bernie Sanders also take them on, and put the second and third steps that are really necessary to make them work. Because I think that's really the three parts of a full left agenda on finance. You have to look at the power of the biggest institutions. All the activities in the financial sector, not just the biggest ones. And also the way finance really distorts the real economy, and makes a much less productive economy. Put those three things together, which I think Bernie could do if he took Hillary's plan and kicked it up a little bit. And then I think we're really talking about a future that we can believe in.

JAY: Okay. But aren't you essentially saying Hillary's plan is actually more effective than the current Sanders plan?

KONCZAL: You know, I think they're just different focuses. You know, there's a matter of how much you want to relatively weight them. I think there's a lot of disagreement about the importance of Glass-Steagall. I think people who are very concerned about the financial sector can come to very different conclusions about how prioritized that could be. I'm a big fan of break up the banks. I think we've had such good results with forcing banks to fund themselves more with equity than debt, so-called capital requirements, that that's a really useful way to push forward, that I would like to see Bernie use that language a little bit more. I think there's a real consensus that moves there.

I do think it's fair to say that Bernie's plan is incomplete unless really addresses those other two issues. I think it also, I think just from Bernie Sanders' point of view, is that it would kind of cut off some of the criticism, yes, that he's too myopically focused on the biggest banks. Just in absorbing these things as things. Because I think, you know, break up the banks is very powerful language, it points to a real problem in our economy. But there are also other problems in the financial sector.

JAY: Okay. Bill, respond to what Mike was saying, that essentially there's quite a few elements, if I'm hearing him correctly, of the Clinton plan. That makes sense, and he'd like the Sanders campaign to adopt them. What do you make of that?

BLACK: Well, I think there are parts to the Clinton plan that make sense, but they are the poetry parts. In other words, there are things that overwhelmingly, that Mike just stressed can't be done without new legislation in general. And so--and they would require, even when she got the legislation and rulemaking, and with the DC circuit and all those nasty type of things, you're talking about many years to get things done. Mike and I probably have very broad agreement on a large number of these things.

First, you should stress the five or six largest banks. And Mike would, as well. Because this is where all the derivatives are. Something like 95 percent of all the derivatives are in those five or six banks. And they do pose very special problems, and we need to get them to the point where we aren't rolling the dice every day for when the next global crisis will occur. Not if, when. Because these--all history says these institutions will fail over time, and they will take down the global system.

So--and capital in the way that Hillary is thinking of it will not work. Hillary still thinks that capital is actually money in a vault. It's simply an accounting residual. Assets minus liability equals capital. If you inflate assets or understate liabilities, voila, you have huge capital, your Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, capital is part of the story, it's good. But you can't simply assume that because they report they have capital that there is actually any capital there.

So once you deal with those six, you have another 15 that you have to deal with that are also too big to fail. And I think the Sanders regime needs--actually I think all the candidates, Republican, Democrats, need to get rid of those institutions.

Now, our group thinks that it is really critical to bring back Glass-Steagall. Now, to pick up your discussion, you are correct, and I've said it before on Real News, that Glass-Steagall had endured the, you know, the death of a thousand cuts mostly at the hands of a certain head of the Federal Reserve, right.

JAY: And to a large extent during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

BLACK: Both the presidency of Bill Clinton and of Bush. But yes, much of it was done with Clinton. So you have to bring back Glass-Steagall when it actually wasn't swiss cheese. But it's a very good thing to do that. And most of the arguments against it really don't make a lot of conceptual sense.

So for example, you hear, well, this wasn't the cause of the most recent crisis. Well, A, that's irrelevant, because you don't just prepare to fight the last war, right? We all emphasize to our students, don't think that way. Second, before the crisis, once we repealed Glass-Steagall, there were a whole series of scandals, and a whole series of large losses, because we brought investment banking into commercial banking. And once we got to the crisis, the losses just in those actions authorized by the repeal of Glass-Steagall were sufficient to bring down Citigroup, one of the largest banks in the world. And while, yes, Lehman prompted the financial crisis, if there hadn't been Lehman, Citi would have brought it down as well.

And the so-called shadow banks, well, where did they get their financing? And indeed, in many cases they were actually affiliates of the largest banks in the world. So they wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as large, and the systemically dangerous institutions wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as large. Because when Glass-Steagall was repealed, virtually all the securities activities that go into banks, they went into the eight or so largest banks, and indeed overwhelmingly they went into the six largest banks.

And then there's the dispersion. If you're a libertarian or a conservative, in particular, you must think this is nuts. So an investment bank gets to take an ownership position. It gets to own things. It can buy an auto company. And it gets a direct federal subsidy from deposit insurance, and then it gets an indirect subsidy from this too big to fail. And they compete against some other company that doesn't have it. Now, that's, to economists that's nuts, that really distorts the economy. But we're also on the hook as treasury for all of that. And let's recall, turn around the shadow argument. Hillary argues, hey, three of the five investment--biggest investment banks in America failed. Quite correct. Out of five, that's a 60 percent failure rate. So why are we providing deposit insurance to people doing securities, right--.

So I think the place that we have in common is individual minimum capital requirements.

JAY: Mike, I want to come back to you and talk about breaking up the big banks. I mean, obviously a lot of how significant this is going to be is going to be in the detail. But I've not heard Bernie Sanders talk about how to break up the big banks. In other words, if you don't have some serious anti-trust kind of legislation, I would think, that would stop the same pools of capital owning the smaller banks, then does it really make that much difference? I mean, you have to--don't you have to break up who owns these other banks rather than just break up the banks? Mike.

KONCZAL: So Bernie Sanders has emphasized using powers within Dodd-Frank. Right now in Dodd-Frank, regulators, if they believe a bank is a systemic threat to the economy, can make very drastic and very dramatic changes to their structure. They can break off business lines, force them to do things very differently, break them up, as opposed--you know, impose size caps.

The process he has described for doing it is a hard one. It requires a lot of regulators. He would need to appoint essentially about seven out of ten of the regulators to be on board with the project. But just having a Treasury secretary and just having a Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen's term will end a year into the next person's--whoever the next president is, a year into their term.

You know, there's a lot of soft pressure in the regulatory atmosphere that could, you know, discourage consolid--further consolidation. Encourage, you know, stricter enforcement. It does have a trickle effect, and it does have--it can have a pretty big knock-on effect, even if you can't get the votes. Meaning if he can't get the pressure to where he wants it to be to fully break them down in size.

JAY: Bill, same question. I mean, when, in your whistleblowers group you're talking about using existing regulation. So can you use existing regulation to break up the big banks, and do it in a way that the same people don't wind up owning these various other structures, anyway? We saw breaking up of phone companies, and they wound up kind of re-concentrating and emerging as, you know, maybe more, but bigger monopolies again, and you know, similar pools of capital controlling them.

BLACK: Yes, you can do it. And you can do it in a much easier way than under Dodd-Frank, under authority that's existed for over a quarter century called the individual minimum capital requirement. And you don't need--Mike is quite correct about how the committee votes work, but you don't have to go through those kind of committee votes. So you can do that, and you use, as Mike talked about earlier, capital. But we're talking about capital requirements that actually track the global risk that these places impose. And that is enormous.

And that means the capital requirement would be--if you did it in an actuarially sound way, which is what we recommend, would be extraordinary. And the banks would have to shrink, and they would shrink to the level that they no longer posed a systemic risk. We would also use the same device to bring back, effectively, Glass-Steagall. Because, again, I've just said, you had a 60 percent failure rate when you are doing investment banking. So if somebody wants to do investment banking they're going to face capital requirements in the 40, 50, 60 percent range. They're not going to do it, in other words, in those circumstances.

And we suggest that this is also the way to do what is in many ways the most critical change. And that is the perverse compensation systems that exist now in both executive compensation, but also professionals. This is how they suborned the credit rating agencies, the top-tier audit firms, the appraisers and such. And there is really nothing effective in Dodd-Frank against this, and so you could use the individual minimum capital requirements, saying look, you have, you create perverse incentives. Your risk of failure is massively greater, and again, you will face capital requirements in the 40, 50, 60 percent range. In other words, you're not going to be able to do it in these circumstances.

So yeah, it doesn't matter where they come, try to hide through shell devices, as long as they have these kinds of perverse incentive systems. Either they're doing securities activities or they have the perverse compensation systems. And the individual minimum capital requirement, with no new regulations, no statutory changes, all prose, could be used by any president. So this isn't something we have offered just to Democratic candidates. We want any and every--we want voters, whoever you support, put your candidate on notice. Do you pledge to implement the whistleblowers plan?

JAY: All right, gentlemen, we're going to of course in coming days dig into all of this a lot more, but I want to thank you for joining us. Tonight we'll go back to Des Moines, but thank you ,Bill, thank you, Mike. And we'll go back to live in Des Moines and catch up with what's happening there.

BLACK: Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Paul.

KONCZAL: Thank you, guys.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15580


Bernie and the Big Banks October 2015

Sanders and Sherman introduce Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Exist Act ( May 2015 )

Sherman Reintroduces "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act" ( 2012 )

Is Sanders proposal to break up the big banks a solution to the power and concentrated wealth of Wall St.? Bill Black and Leo Panitch discuss and debate the plan.



biography

Leo Panitch is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto. He is the author of many books, the most recent of which include UK Deutscher Memorial Prize winner The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire and In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives. He is also a co-editor of the Socialist Register, whose 2013 volume is entitled The Question of Strategy.

William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.

Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

transcript

Bernie and the Big Banks (1/3)PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

This is the beginning of a series we will be doing over the next few months looking at the various candidates for president and their policy, and what they're proposing, how to solve burning issues facing all of us. We're going to start today with Bernie Sanders and what Mr. Sanders would do with the big banks and Wall Street. Here's a little clip from the recent debate.

BERNIE SANDERS: That the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street, where fraud is a business model, helped to destroy this economy and the lives of millions of people. Check the record. In the 1990s, and all due respect, in the 1990s when I had the Republican leadership, and Wall Street spending billions of dollars in lobbying, when the Clinton administration, when Alan Greenspan said, what a great idea it would be to allow these huge banks to merge, Bernie Sanders fought them. And helped lead the opposition to deregulation. Today it is my view that when you have, the three largest banks in America are much bigger than they were when we bailed them out for being too big to fail, we have got to break them up.

JAY: Now joining us to talk about Bernie Sanders' proposals on what to do with Wall Street, what he calls the fraud model of doing business, first of all in Toronto is Leo Panitch. He's a Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto. He's also the winner of the UK Deutscher Prize for his book with Sam Gindin, The Making Of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. And also joining us from Kansas City, Missouri, is Bill Black. Bill is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He is a white collar criminologist and a former financial regulator, and author of the book that has one of the best titles of any books on economics: The Best Way To Rob a Bank is to Own One. Thank you both for joining us.

Now, let's talk about Bernie Sanders. First of all, Bill, is breaking up the big banks an effective proposal? An effective solution? I have heard a critique of that position, and I must say, a position that in fact is not so radical, is supported by apparently several former heads of the Federal Reserve, including Ben Bernanke, as mentioned. We've heard apparently from Alan Greenspan, and some others. Volcker. But is this an effective proposal?

BILL BLACK: Yes. It's not sufficient in itself to protect us, but it's essential to be part of the protection. As long as you allow systemically dangerous institutions to exist, the definition of how you become such an institution is that when you fail, and it's a question of when, not if, it is very likely to cause a global financial crisis. So why would we sit around with worldwide roughly 50 of these ticking time bombs, wondering when, which particular act of fraud or insanity is going to kick them over the edge and bring down the global economy? This should be one of our absolute top priorities, ending the existence of systemically dangerous institutions. And it's one of the few win-wins because they're also inefficient. They are far too large to be efficient economic entities. And of course they make real democracy impossible. So it's a win-win-win to get rid of them.

JAY: Okay. Leo, is this effective policy?

LEO PANITCH: It's great to have a presidential candidate critiquing the banks this way and identifying the enormous power of the big banks. But you know, I think one shouldn't get too hot about this in terms of how much it'll accomplish. America has always had a great number of banks, and it's had loads of financial crisis with those great number of banks. One may remember even recently the savings and loan. Moreover the financialization of the world economy centered in the American capitalist economy is very, very deep. And it's a democratized financialization. A democratization of debt credit, where ordinary people are stuck into the banking system.

And this isn't, you know, your old day of JP Morgan or high finance. You have a financial system which lends to the masses, and which the masses depend on for consumerism. And they don't have to be loaning from Goldman Sachs. In fact, as occurred with the mortgage crisis, although Goldman Sachs and its ilk were reducing many of the instruments, the derivative instruments, that were crucial to it, the actual link was through small banks and mortgage dealers, et cetera.

Moreover, I have to say this, I think Sanders' representation which a lot of the left presents, that everything was hunky dory until Glass-Steagall was removed, really needs to be looked at again.

JAY: Well, we're going to talk--Leo, we're going to talk about Glass-Steagall next. I just want to focus on this one issue, about whether breaking up the big banks is really going to be effective, assuming one could actually pass such a thing.

PANITCH: What they're doing, I'd like to point out, will be taken up outside of what has been regulated and where Fed regulators are. As we see now with the hedge funds operations. A lot of what the banks used to do, the investment banks, are now being done by hedge funds, and they're even less regulated.

JAY: Bill, what do you make of what Leo's saying? But also, I've also heard the critique that if you break up big banks--I know you said that's only one piece of several things that need to be done. But on its own, breaking up the big banks, given how banks seem to invest or follow activities essentially in a herd--like, if there's a ton of money to be made in subprime mortgages, they all go into subprime mortgages. So if you break them up, don't you just have more of them doing the same thing? In other words, it's more a sectorial systemic risk than just a few big institutions.

BLACK: Okay. This is why I did emphasize, of course it is not the single solution to all problems of banking. It doesn't fundamentally transform capitalism, for example, or financialization of the world. But let's take, for example, the savings and loan case. So there were many more failures in the savings and loan crisis. Actually, roughly about three times as many failures just in savings and loans than in the current crisis with banks and savings and loans combined. And if you added bank failures in, that would go to more like five times the current crisis. But there was not even a mild recession as a result of that crisis.

Now, a large part of that was due to the more vigorous regulatory response. But it was critical that not a single one of the institutions that failed was a systemically dangerous institution. And so no, they don't all just do it. And if you want to talk about the unregulated sector, yes, it's quite true that we have first the number of banks. Yes, the United States has many banks, still, but it has fewer than half as many banks as it did roughly 20 years ago. So the number of banks is falling at a very fast clip. And in terms of the dominance of the big four banks, that is just extraordinary in key sectors such as financial derivatives, where indeed the big five banks are estimated to have, depending on the year, 95-97 percent of all the derivatives training in the United States, which is the largest such trading area in the world.

While there were small mortgage banks involved, in virtually all cases their funding came from too big to fail institutions. So yes, of course you have to watch out. Do the systemically dangerous institutions, do they have avenues that they can escape regulation by using in essence cutouts of things like mortgage banks to escape jurisdiction? And you should bring that within jurisdiction. Again, getting rid of the systemically dangerous institutions, however, means that they can't take advantage of those gaps in the same way.

JAY: Leo?

PANITCH: Well, yeah. I think, though, that one needs to see that this isn't just speculation and predatory finance. The function that these very large, concentrated banks play--and remember, one of the reasons they get so concentrated is that they eat up the smaller banks, or the more successful middle-sized banks eat up the smaller banks and get big.

But in, you know, in the case of the really big ones the Bill's talking about they perform an important function for the integrated network of global trade through the derivative market. You know, Caterpillar was opposed, as opposed as the banks, when it came to lobbying the American Congress to the types of regulation, very mild as they were, that were introduced a couple of years ago. And the reason they're opposed to it is that derivative trading in the foreign exchange market, is necessary for them. It's functional for them. They need it, and they want very large institutions capable of creating the type of financial product, and having very deep financial pockets, that can make that market go. That is, you know, when they sell or buy a part on the other side of the world, whoever they're doing it with--and you have to ensure that you'll have a profit at the end if exchange rates change.

That's not simply something--it is based on speculation, of course. A lot of people are speculating on what the renminbi will be in relation to the dollar two, three, four months from now. Indeed, one day from now. A lot of people are speculating on that. And the banks fund that speculation. But it's also functional to global production, given the way that globalization has developed. So it isn't just a matter of bad speculators. And you know, Bill may say, well you know, you're simply saying one should nationalize the world. I'm simply pointing out the nature of the world. And one shouldn't, I think, create illusions that this is all a matter of evil speculators.

BLACK: It's actually not speculation, it's rigged. You're describing the FX, foreign exchange market, which is the second-largest cartel in the history of the world. And it's a cartel because there are so few banks that dominate it that it's easy to form and maintain cartel discipline. Whereas if you had many institutions that were rivals providing these kinds of derivatives it's just standard economics even that it would be much harder to form and much, much harder to maintain a cartel. So yeah, Caterpillar may have thought it was being , but in fact Caterpillar was being ripped off.

JAY: Leo, you're shaking your head.

PANITCH: Well, you know, that's the typical American, you know, hidden hand of the market kind of view. Although it's often presented, of course, I think in a genuine way from the left that is critical of the enormous power of capital in its various guises in the states. But there isn't a hidden hand of the market. And shysterism in these markets is as rampant, if not more, amongst small and medium-size financiers and businesses generally, than it is in big. In fact, the regulators that the Fed now has in every systemically important institution, you'd have to ask whether that could be maintained in a way that would stabilize the system. At least contain failures, which as the Treasury says, it's now its main function, were you to actually decentralize too much, without turning finance into a public utility, which would be an entirely different matter.

The Treasury has said since the late '90s, we're no longer in the business of failure prevention because of the functional role that finance plays in global production. We're in the business of failure containment because we know there will be inevitable crises. And essentially what the regulators do is try to contain either the likelihood of failure or actual failure. And they do it by being located in--and yes, I think embedded in in a way that makes them complicit with the power of--these systemically important institutions.

BLACK: So let's take that from someone--this is my life. White-collar criminology and financial regulation. First, the FX cartel is real. It's not delusional. It's admitted to by the participants. So it isn't some standard, you know, canon of the left. It's like this thing called reality. Second, when you try to regulate through embedded regulators, you put examiners on-site, they always marry the natives. In fact, we have had that phrase in banking regulation for at least 30 years that I've been involved. So we all know that always fails. Third, it's quite true that finance, the Treasury, through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, expressly decided about 25 years ago that they would change the banking regulatory approach and no longer seek to change the amount of risk being taken, and instead supposedly manage it. That led to the crisis, and has been a catastrophic failure.

So real regulators don't want to follow the approach, you're quite right, that the Obama appointees are still following the Bush playbook. And when you combine that with systemically dangerous institutions, it means that as soon as they're able to get the economy humming again, and we can really gear up first-class bubbles, we're likely to have another crisis. So yeah, we really do want to change that stuff. But not because we're lefties, but because we're actually studied criminology, and actually we're effective financial regulators, and know what works and what fails.

JAY: Okay. So if I understand this correctly, Bill is saying we--this corruption is endemic, and one way amongst others is to break up big banks. Leo is saying there needs to be banks of a certain scale in order to carry on global commerce. On the other hand, there's another alternative to this, and that's what Leo mentioned, is the idea of treating banks as a public utility.

So in the next part of our discussion we're going to take up that idea of Leo's, and he'll explain it, and Bill will tell us what he thinks of it. So please join us as we continue this discussion. We started with Sanders, Bernie Sanders' proposal on breaking up big banks, and we're going forward with what would be effective policy in addition to or instead of breaking up big banks. Please join us for that on the Real News Network.

End

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14958

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. wapo won't let me read that unless i give them money, so i don't care about their opinion.

[NWCorona]

13. If you hit the stop button before the page fully loads

You can prevent it from redirecting you to the sign up page.

[leftynyc]

21. Gee, that's funny

I got a google cache of the article on my first try. Perhaps you just didn't want to read it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/05/this-new-york-daily-news-interview-was-pretty-close-to-a-disaster-for-bernie-sanders/

Just tried it again, no problem.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

25. i don't actually. i read the interview transcript and made up my own mind.

[leftynyc]

27. How

pathetically predictable.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

33. making up my own mind is pathetic? how droll of you

[leftynyc]

35. No - first whining about

the paywall when you had no intention of reading the article anyway is what's pathetically predictable.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

36. there was a little money for newz snark in there

Sorry it went over your head

[leftynyc]

37. LOL

that's adorable. Thinking you post over my head.

[MADem]

68. Open an incognito page and go to it from there.

Or better still, go to the source--and read/listen to the disastrous interview for yourself.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306

This interview changed my mind about Sanders, I have to say. I used to think he just wasn't quite as good--now I think he is completely unprepared and has no business even running for office. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

It's SCARY.

[anotherproletariat]

6. Wow...I didn't realize the depth of his ignorance...

You can't just have slogans with no working plan to implement them. I don't think he ever thought he would get this far, but as soon as he mentioned 'free college' his following swelled with people who didn't bother to look at the facts. The real elephant in the room (that no one dare mention) of this entire election cycle is the lack of sophistication of the electorate. So many people either don't have the tools to critically examine candidates and their promises, or don't care to - and just vote based on catch phrases.

[Joe the Revelator]

10. If Bernie is this bad, why can't Hillary close the nomination?

Why is she losing state after state to him? That is the real question.

[Joe the Revelator]

11. And also, two cherry picked portions of a 'gotcha!' interview aren't that concerning to me

But again, the Washington Post shows its true colors.

[athena]

22. The whole interview is like that.

The Washington Post had to pick parts because they couldn't very well print the whole thing. But I encourage you to read the whole thing. It's amazing.

In fact, the best part, which they would have printed if they really wanted to "cherry-pick", is where Bernie lies about taking public transportation.

Here is the full transcript:

http://m.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306

[mythology]

41. For the same reason Obama didn't win every state

After it was clear he was overwhelmingly likely to win. Demographics and variance between caucuses/primaries and which states a campaign chooses to focus/invest in.

But Clinton is further ahead than Obama ever was in 2008.

[R B Garr]

12. Wow, these are the kinds of linear thinking questions to which Sanders has not

been subjected. These are just standard process vetting questions and he is way behind the curve with answering these since he's gotten such a free pass and only stumps his fluffy rhetoric.

What is the process? Under what authority? Where does the rubber meet the road on all the ideas. This was evident some months ago on Bloomburg when he was either unable or unwilling to name Wall Street execs and their crimes whom he would target for prosecution for "fraud", yet he accuses these anonymous people daily in his stump speech. Who are they? What are their names? What are their crimes? Hating billionaires is not a policy proposal. Ugh, I don't know how people can take this stuff from him seriously! How frustrating to even listen to someone bellyache forever with NO plan!

Thank you New York Daily News!! It is actually scary that he had no answers. Apparently this is more ego trip for him than anything else.

[Armstead]

29. Clinton would spout 150 words in a confusing stream to disguise the fact that she didn't know

"I think that deserves further study. It's a serious issue . However I am not prepared to make a judgement until all of the facts are in, but I am prepared to say that it is a serious issue that affects us all. I am the one with experience to take on these problems.....blah,blah'blah"

[bettyellen]

42. I've been hearing the opposite criticism- that she is often way too detailed when discussing policy.

Go figure.

[R B Garr]

63. She's quite wonky. She has a depth and breadth of knowledge that is

head and shoulders above her rivals. If anything, she would have dazzled with her knowledge of policy, history, etc.

[Alfresco]

14. It clearly shows that Bernie doesn't know what he's talking about.

[azurnoir]

15. Capehart's employer says what?

[riversedge]

16. Tweet to go...

This NY Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for @BernieSanders http://wpo.st/OVOS1 #feeltheBern #ReleasetheReturns #ImWithHer

[Gothmog]

17. How Much Does Bernie Sanders Know About Policy?

Sanders is not clear on policy. He is good at sound bytes but cannot explain how to be break up the big banks
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/bernie-sanderss-rough-ride-with-the-daily-news/476919/

It’s striking that there hasn’t been more coverage of Sanders’s policy ideas so far during the campaign, even at this late date, with most of the primary season concluded. He’s even acquired a reputation as something of a wonk, the kind of guy who eschews soaring rhetoric for dry nuts and bolts on the stump—and gets people to love him anyway. The gaps uncovered by the Daily News are not just about pragmatism. (There have, of course, been plenty of accusations, not least from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that Sanders is offering a deeply unrealistic program. He tends to answer that they fail to grasp that he is building a political revolution.) The question here is not how Sanders would enact policies, but what those policies would be. If the Sanders campaign has shied away from deep dives into policy, this interview might be why: The candidate reveals himself as a far defter diagnostician than clinician.

The most glaring example came early in the encounter, during a discussion of the problem of “too big to fail” banks. There is disagreement among economists on the left over how important, if at all, it is to break up large financial institutions. The board granted Sanders’s argument and asked him how he’d do it, producing an excruciating cat-and-mouse game:

Daily News: Okay. Well, let's assume that you're correct on that point. How do you go about doing it?

Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.

Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?

Sanders: Well, I don't know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.

Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, "Now you must do X, Y and Z?"

Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.

Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?

Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do.

The conversation detoured sideways a bit, as the board asked about what would happen to employees and investors in big banks and Sanders said, not unfairly, that it wasn’t his problem. But then it was back to how to break up the banks, and Sanders still couldn’t offer a coherent answer:

Daily News: Well, it does depend on how you do it, I believe. And, I'm a little bit confused because just a few minutes ago you said the U.S. President would have authority to order...

Sanders: No, I did not say we would order. I did not say that we would order. The President is not a dictator.

Daily News: Okay. You would then leave it to JPMorgan Chase or the others to figure out how to break it, themselves up. I'm not quite...

Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.

Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?

Sanders: It's something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that

.

You do not advocate breaking up the big banks without considering how this will be accomplished

[JudyM]

46. The man is a policy thinker -- it is not his responsibility to figure out how any more than if he

were saying he will crack down on any monopolies.

[Gothmog]

47. He is running to be POTUS

It is his responsibility to understand what he is proposing and how to implement such proposal

[JudyM]

48. Sorry, no. That is tactical; a leader's focus is strategic. Other people have thought that through.

http://billmoyers.com/story/why-bernies-right-about-glass-steagall/

[redstateblues]

54. creative spin-nice try

That is Bernie's main issue. It's like everything he wants to do-he has no clue how to.

[JudyM]

61. Ask Clinton the same questions - not that she is actually going to do anything much beyond

status quo...

[Gothmog]

58. Here are some more facts about how poorly informed Sanders is https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/

Here are some more facts about how poorly informed Sanders is https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/04/05/9-things-bernie-sanders-shouldve-known-about-but-didnt-in-that-daily-news-interview/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Nine moments in the Sanders conversation left me agape. From his own plans for breaking up too-big-to-fail banks to how he would handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to dealing with the Islamic State, the man giving homegirl Hillary Clinton a run for her money seemed surprisingly out of his depth. The bold in the text is mine for emphasis.

1. Breaking up the banks

Daily News: Okay. Well, let’s assume that you’re correct on that point. How do you go about doing [breaking up the banks]?

Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.

Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?

Sanders: Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.

Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, “Now you must do X, Y and Z?”

Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.

Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?

Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do.

2. The legal implications of breaking up a financial institution

Daily News: Well, it does depend on how you do it, I believe. And, I’m a little bit confused because just a few minutes ago you said the U.S. President would have authority to order…

Sanders: No, I did not say we would order. I did not say that we would order. The President is not a dictator.

Daily News: Okay. You would then leave it to JPMorgan Chase or the others to figure out how to break it, themselves up. I’m not quite…

Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.

Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?

Sanders: It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.

3. Prosecuting Wall Street executives for the financial collapse of 2008

Daily News: Okay. But do you have a sense that there is a particular statute or statutes that a prosecutor could have or should have invoked to bring indictments?

Sanders: I suspect that there are. Yes.

Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?

Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don’t. But if I would…yeah, that’s what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that’s illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.

Daily News: I’m only pressing because you’ve made it such a central part of your campaign. And I wanted to know what the mechanism would be to accomplish it.

Considering this is the core of his campaign message, Sanders should know all of the points covered in 1, 2 and 3 inside and out. He should have been able to lecture his interrogators into a stupor with his detailed knowledge. Instead, Sanders sounded slightly better than a college student caught off-guard by a surprise test in his best class just before finals.

Sanders has a talking point but has not considered any of the implications of what this talking point means and how to implement this talking point. This interview is scary.

[JudyM]

69. Those, again, are detailed tactical legal questions, and HE IS NOT A LAWYER, lest we forget.

Let's use one of your examples, your #3: he is being asked about the specific laws that would be used to prosecute execs of companies that were fined. Although he is not a lawyer, he is correct!

The US Federal Sentencing Guidelines make clear that executives and board members of institutions engaging in illegal activities can be personally prosecuted. The specific laws that were violated, whether state or federal, will be the laws that are used to prosecute. Period.

[Gothmog]

70. Sanders is a lawmaker and is suppose to understand the laws that he is proposing

Sanders was totally unable to explain how he would implement his proposals. Sanders is a law maker and needs to be able to describe what steps would be taken to accomplish his goals

[JudyM]

71. Do you also believe that CEOs know all about the laws that control their strategic goals?

[Lucinda]

18. KNR

[Jefferson23]

19. Acoording to Kos who essentially endorsed Hillary, the author is stupid or a moron:

Or is that only when he goes after Hillary?

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza is stupid. Or a moron.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/7/1428927/-The-Washington-Post-s-Chris-Cillizza-is-stupid-Or-a-moron

[Viva_La_Revolution]

34. has kos kicked out all the bernie people yet?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

40. Close. But not yet.

[Jefferson23]

44. I have no idea, I don't post there nor read it..I googled a search on the author

and saw this OP calling the guy a moron.

I suppose his opinion is of value when its about Bernie, he was taken to
task for going after Hillary.

[Jefferson23]

20. Bernie is also correct on the DoJ:

Now the DOJ Admits They Got it Wrong
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/09/now-the-doj-admits-they-got-it-wrong.html

[mhatrw]

24. OH MY GOD! Sanders did not expertly handle some NYDN "gotcha" questions!

Everything is doomed!

[athena]

26. How is it a "gotcha" question to ask how Bernie plans to break up the big banks?

Or is any question Bernie can't answer, by definition, a "gotcha" question?

[Armstead]

32. You set your goals, hire experts to implement them

YOu think Clinton is an expert on finance and investments, without being fed lines from her handlers?


https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/01/16/clinton-record-wall-street-laissez-faire/Z2a3iOsj40wryeRN2iT6qK/story.html
As a senator, Hillary Clinton was hands-off on Wall Street

The financial services executive reached out to Senator Hillary Clinton’s office to discuss legislation that would affect banks. It seemed natural to make the connection: The executive represented some of the largest New York financial institutions.

The call was quickly returned, excellent service provided to a professional watching out for the interests of the country’s biggest banks. But it wasn’t Clinton’s office on the line. An aide to New York’s other senator, Charles Schumer, called back.

Yielding to Schumer on financial legislation was part of a pattern in the Senate when Hillary Clinton served there: She took a mostly hands-off approach to Wall Street regulation. With banks enjoying a new era of deregulation that her husband helped create, a neutralized Clinton represented a win for the financial services industry and its perpetual effort to free itself from Washington’s hand.

[redstateblues]

55. The Sarah Palin defense- pretty thin gruel

[Xyzse]

39. Just linked the long article of the actual interview.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306

I can see how some would call it a disaster dependent on how it is read. His answers are not the easiest to understand, and you can see his frustration in the unfairness, which makes him unable to respond in a completely structured manner.

However, reading through it and getting beyond one or two questions, as they tend to relate, I could see where he is coming from:

-The interview starts off with a leading question asking if companies such as Apple are "destroying the fabric of America". It is a loaded question that basically makes the assumption that Sanders is against corporations, when that is hardly the case.
---He is not against the corporations, he is against the practice of off-shoring jobs and moving headquarters out of the US to avoid paying taxes. Get away from liabilities, and shelter themselves from fines and penalties that they would otherwise pay due to various reasons that can be considered unfair such as:
-----Paying an appropriate wage
-----Avoiding taxes, though they use the US infrastructure
-----Dealing with retirement issues
-----Misc.
---By doing so, and avoiding to pay a fair share in taxes, those funds which could be used for infrastructure spending, such as roads, education and so forth are then being used mostly to bloat their spreadsheets. The issue with such a thing and protecting these large companies are as follows:
-----Large established companies are stable. They do not create jobs once they reach a certain point. They shed jobs. They employ many but the difference is, that they have a set number of jobs, and the idea is to maximize profit, they do replacements rather than adding new jobs.
-----Established companies given more favorable tax terms then use that for cannibalizing their competition. All they do is try to eat from each other's market share, and when they acquire or merge with a competitor, the idea then is laying off and getting rid of redundancy.
-----(To me, they really should concentrate on medium sized companies that are on the verge of expansion. Those are what creates the most jobs, and they are the ones that need the most help to keep their stability.) This is actually what Sanders talks about, supporting the Mid-sized companies, as they are not getting the bank loans they need.
-It then switches to the Banking industry
---They talk about too big to fail banks and how to fix that. I agree that Sanders did not explain himself well on this issue. It is a large issue to tackle, and most quick segment answers are just not enough to deal with this.
------Most too big to fail banks, their issue is that they have so many moving parts and subsidiaries. In a way, Sanders is right however that it would definitely be the Banks who would handle their decoupling.
------Each company is different in what they have as their assets, what are their liabilities and so forth. These types of banks are entities that have acquired many smaller banks, obtaining their assets and setting a less competitive environment for the end users, which are individuals, medium to small size business owners that need loans.

I agree that it is a mess of an interview, as the questions are made in the assumption that Sanders sees all aspects of business as negative, however, in many ways his reasoning is sound.

[SidDithers]

43. And here I thought it was just Devine and Weaver that were in over their heads...

Turns out Sanders isn't ready to be swimming in the deep end either.

Back to the shallow end, Bernie.

Sid

[Beacool]

45. Halperin's take on the interview.

Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin called out the media for a “double standard” when it comes to Bernie Sanders Tuesday, arguing that his opponent Hillary Clinton would be “creamed” if she gave answers as bad as Sanders’ in his New York Daily News editorial meeting.

MSNBC’s daytime coverage of the Wisconsin primary was being headlined by the usual Morning Joe crew (Afternoon Joe perhaps?). “I’m looking at the highlights of this interview that Bernie Sanders did with the New York Daily News, and some of his answers were, let’s just say, counter to what might do well in New York,” host Mika Brzezinski began.

“Everyone interested in this race should read the interview,” Halperin said. “Because his answers are not adequate. And I think he’ll probably look at that and say they were inadequate."

Halperin said that in his own interview of Sanders, he also felt that his answers on economic topics were inadequate. “He’s not as deep. For a guy who’s been in public life for so long, he’s talked about the same things over and over.”

Halperin’s Bloomberg co-host John Heilemann agreed with his assessment. “We did one interview with him that was all on more detailed questions on Wall Street and Wall Street regulation. He was weak then, and that was three months ago. He’s still pretty weak in this interview.”

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/halperin-on-bernies-nydn-interview-hillary-would-be-creamed-if-she-gave-answers-this-bad/

[Nanjeanne]

49. Yes, Bernie Sanders Knows Something About Breaking Up Banks - NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/upshot/yes-bernie-sanders-knows-something-about-breaking-up-banks.html?partner=IFTTT&_r=0

In the interview, with The Daily News’s editorial board, Mr. Sanders does appear to get tangled up in some details and lacks clarity. Breaking up the banks would involve arcane and complex regulatory moves that can trip up any banking policy wonk, let alone a presidential candidate. But, taken as a whole, Mr. Sanders’s answers seem to make sense. Crucially, his answers mostly track with a reasonably straightforward breakup plan that he introduced to Congress last year.

[redstateblues]

56. Bernie is not ready for prime time.

[Cali_Democrat]

50. An utter disaster. nt

[Csainvestor]

51. Yes, Bernie Sanders Knows Something About Breaking Up Banks --New York Times

Breaking up the banks would involve arcane and complex regulatory moves that can trip up any banking policy wonk, let alone a presidential candidate. But, taken as a whole, Mr. Sanders’s answers seem to make sense. Crucially, his answers mostly track with a reasonably straightforward breakup plan that he introduced to Congress last year.

Here are the most relevant parts of the exchange.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/upshot/yes-bernie-sanders-knows-something-about-breaking-up-banks.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur&referer&_r=0

[CanadaexPat]

52. It was great. Job #1: make the right decisions.

[Cha]

57. Exposed.. about time.

[BreakfastClub]

59. Yikes, that was bad. I kind of felt sorry for him. nt

[Bread and Circus]

62. I'll take the guy who was right on trade, war, and human rights over your gal who is wrong on nearly

everything time and again.

Bernie has our backs.

Hillary is a corporate sellout shill who would economically stab you in the back for a fat donor check any day of the week.

[Demnorth]

64. Thanks, good read.

"Breaking up the big banks" was a catchphrase I heard so often, I wondered how it was actually done.

I understand the attraction of the general message - who doesn't love a good revolution? But to bring about change, there has to be a plan. Sanders used to answer a lot of questions by blaming Wall Street, which didn't tell me much about him. I really thought he'd be better prepared to follow through with details by now.

You can criticize bias of a network or newspaper, but bottom line - are the questions fair? They are.

[Bonobo]

66. You're right. If not for that, he may have won in Wisconsin by 100 points! nt