"Commit to voting for the 'Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist' Act, introduced in the Senate by Bernie Sanders, and finally break up the too-big-to-fail banks."

If Senator Bernie Sanders gets his way, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are going to end up in pieces.

Seven years after their criminal fraud nearly collapsed the global economy and they came crawling to the rest of us for a bailout, too-big-to-fail banks are actually 80 percent bigger than they once were.¹ Today, they pose an even greater threat to our financial system. The risky gambling and deceptive speculation continues. Wall Street reform has imposed new rules, but it hasn’t changed the game.

Last week, Senator Sanders introduced a bill to end “too big to fail” once and for all.² Now it is up to us to show the rest of Congress that it is time to break up the biggest banks.

Stand with Bernie Sanders: Tell Congress to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Click here to sign the petition.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law added new oversight, new rules, and most importantly created new institutions like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but it didn’t go far enough. Today, the biggest banks are bigger than ever, they can borrow money at lower rates because the market assumes we will bail them out, and their reckless behavior continues.

In just the past few years, large financial institutions have been caught rigging interest rates, manipulating foreign exchange rates, selling people misleading financial products, facilitating tax evasion and money laundering, and more.³ The expansion of high-frequency, algorithmic speculation and front-running has increased risks. In the “flash crash” of 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 1,000 points in just minutes before rapidly recovering.⁴

In 2008, we were told that the American people had no choice but to provide $700 billion in taxpayer bailouts – not to mention the Federal Reserve’s $16 trillion in near-zero interest loans – because if the largest financial institutions failed, they would drag the rest of the system down with them. But if the biggest banks have only gotten bigger, what will we do when the next crisis strikes? As Sanders said introducing his bill, “If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.”⁵

Stand with Bernie Sanders: Tell Congress to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Click here to sign the petition.

Sanders’ “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act,” and its companion bill in the House introduced by Rep. Brad Sherman, would direct the government to compile a list of systemically important financial institutions, just as Dodd-Frank did. But it would also direct the Secretary of the Treasury to break up those institutions within one year, and ban them all from receiving special help from the Federal Reserve or gambling with federally-insured deposits. Under this bill, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley would all be broken up.⁶

It wasn’t long ago that trust-busting and breaking up monopolies was considered common sense. We broke up the telecom giants as recently as the 1980’s. And today, Sanders’ bill is supported by the Independent Community Bankers of America.⁷ But too many members of Congress are still scared to confront Wall Street, so we need to show that countless Americans stand with Bernie Sanders and demand that too-big-to-fail banks be broken up. Click the link below to tell Congress to break up too-big-to-fail banks.

http://act.credoaction.com/sign/2015breakupbanks?t=7&akid=14337.1647103.vbuihg

Thank you for speaking out.

Becky Bond, Political Director

CREDO Action from Working Assets

Add your name:

1. Senator Bernie Sanders, “Break Up Big Banks,” Huffington Post, May 7, 2015.
2. “Sanders Files Bill to Break Up Big Banks,” Sanders.Senate.Gov, May 6, 2015.
3. “Five other banking scandals since 2008,” 4 News, February 9, 2015.
4. Scott Gamm, “'Flash Crash' of 2010 Is History but Stock Markets Are Still Vulnerable," The Street, May 6, 2015.
5. “Sanders Files Bill to Break Up Big Banks.”
6. Ibid.
7. Senator Sanders, “Break Up Big Banks