Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Reform Plan Leaves Credit Rating Agencies Untouched

Hillary Clinton. (Patrick Semansky / AP)

“Clinton’s vision of financial reform neglects one part of the industry everyone agrees was an essential factor in the 2008 crisis: the credit rating agencies, which assess the worthiness of Wall Street securities for investors,” writes David Dayen at The Intercept.

Dayen continues:

Hillary Clinton’s response to Bernie Sanders’s plan to aggressively break up the big banks responsible for the financial crisis is to suggest that he is naive.

“My plan also goes beyond the biggest banks to include the whole financial sector,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed in December. “My plan is more comprehensive,” she said at the first Democratic debate in October — and for that reason, “frankly, it’s tougher.” […]

Sanders’s plan, released last week, would no longer allow the companies that issue securities to pick which rating agency they use — a simple but outrageous practice that creates an enormous conflict of interest and helps facilitate fraud.

The heart of Clinton’s pitch on Wall Street is that she recognizes all potential hazards. But there is not one word in her big reform plan about the rating agencies.