Elizabeth Warren just laid out all the financial reforms she wants to push through
"The culture of cheating on Wall Street didn't stop with the 2008 crash," the populist Massachusetts Senator said.
Here are some other highlights from her speech:
She said "Republicans are pushing an anti-market agenda."
Warren said that "rules are not the enemy of markets," but rather essential ingredients to keeping markets healthy. Rolling back regulation can be "profoundly anti-market," she said.
She called out Republicans for pushing back on the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which she helped spearhead in 2010, saying that "would undermine the market by taking financial cops off the beat."
She wants to bring back Glass-Steagall.
This isn't the first time Warren has said she wants to reinstate the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. She's been working with Senators McCain, King, and Cantwell to recreate the bill, which kept a wall between commercial and investment banking, and which she says is just the kind of rule the markets need today.
"If banks want access to government-provided deposit insurance, they should be limited to boring banking," she said. "If banks want to engage in high-risk trading, they can go for it - but they can't get access to insured deposits and put the taxpayer on the hook for some of that risk."
She's trying to make subprime car loans a thing.
"Right now, the auto loan market looks increasingly like the pre-crisis housing market, with good actors and bad actors mixed together," Warren said.
Subprime auto loans could become a new rallying point for the Senator, who said the CFPB should be allowed to supervise that market, crack down on loan underwriting standards, and prevent car dealers from marking up costs to consumers.
She called out the DOJ for never taking "big financial institutions to trial - ever" and said "the SEC is even worse."
"The SEC needs to get its act together - in all sorts of ways, and on all sorts of issues," Warren said. "When small banks break the law, their regulators do not hesitate to shut down the banks, toss their executives in jail, and put their employees out of work. But not so for the biggest financial institutions."
Rather than overhauling the regulators, or creating new ones, Warren wants to see them use more of their existing enforcement tools and put an end to the "'slap on the wrist' culture" she perceives on Wall Street.