MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Hillary Clinton vows banks cannot be “too big to fail” since it's still “too big a problem”

A former first lady and US senator, Clinton is the clear favorite to win the Democratic nomination for the November 2016 US presidential election

US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton criticized Wall Street and her Republican rivals, promising to impose tougher regulations on banks and raise the wages of ordinary Americans if she wins the 2016 White House race. Under pressure from a campaign rival on the left, Clinton said she would appoint strict overseers to ensure that financial institutions never again indulge in the risky behavior that helped cause the 2008 banking crash.

 In an address on Monday that her campaign promoted as a major economic policy speech, the former secretary of state vowed that banks cannot be “too big to fail.”

“As we all know in the years before the crash, financial firms piled risk upon risk, and regulators in Washington either couldn't or wouldn't keep up,” she said at The New School, a liberal university in Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

“I will appoint and empower regulators who understand that too big to fail is still too big a problem,” Clinton said. She promised to go beyond the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that imposed stronger regulations on the financial industry.

But Alan Blinder, an economist who advises Clinton's campaign anticipated she had no plans to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to split commercial banks from their investment banking operations.

A former first lady and US senator, Clinton is the clear favorite to win the Democratic nomination for the November 2016 presidential election but is facing a challenge from Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator and self-styled socialist who is drawing large crowds at campaign events.

Clinton put the fight for higher wages for everyday Americans at the heart of her economic agenda, although her speech was short on specific policy proposals. She said the US economy will only run at full steam when middle-class wages rise steadily along with executive salaries and company profits.