Financial industry not keen on possibility of Sherrod Brown as chairman of Senate Banking Committee
Sherrod Brown: not the financial industry's favorite candidate to chair the Senate Banking Committee come 2015.
Seung Min Kim and Kate Davidson put on their speculators' caps at Politico Wednesday to assess the impact that Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio would have if he wound up in the chairman's seat of the Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee in 2015 since the current chairman, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, is leaving the Senate after next year. Not surprisingly, a lot of bankers don't like the idea because, in the words of the writers, Brown is big on "bashing" big banks.
It's certainly true that Brown would be tougher on big banks than the financial industry is used to. And the one-two punch of Brown and freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts could turn the committee into far more of an activist watchdog than it's been in decades. Brown already has made it clear that banks "too big too fail" are banks too big, period:
“It’s not just that they are too big to fail,” the senator says. “They really are too big to understand and too big to manage. They are certainly too big to regulate. And they have only gotten bigger since the financial crisis.” The concentration of banking power in a few big-name firms was already dangerous. Now it is even more dangerous.
Senator Brown explains, “The four largest behemoths, now ranging from $1.4 trillion to $2.3 trillion in assets, are the result of thirty-seven banks merging thirty-three times. In 1995, the six biggest US banks had assets equal to 18 percent of GDP. Today, they are about 63 percent of GDP.”
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