Hillary Clinton Lets Big Banks Off the Hook for Financial Crisis

Hillary Clinton's explanation of what caused the 2008 financial crisis contains a notable omission.

Throughout the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Clinton has taken a markedly less critical view of large financial institutions like Citigroup Inc. than Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and presidential rival Bernie Sanders. Instead, Clinton has placed the blame on "shadow banking," a term she has used to describe hedge funds and high-frequency traders.

“Her comments on their face are wrong,” said Christopher Whalen, senior managing director at Kroll Bond Rating Agency and author of Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream. “It is incorrect to blame the crisis on shadow banks. You can’t really differentiate between what they were doing and what Citi was doing.”

“If you don’t think Citibank was center to this crisis, it’s hard to imagine why we spent billions bailing them out,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign For America’s Future, who referred to Clinton as “Wall Street’s favorite Democrat.”

Senator Sherrod Brown, the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, has hammered the biggest banks from Capitol Hill and isn’t about to let them off the hook for the crisis, even as he said he’s “not going to get in a fight with Hillary.”
“There is plenty of responsibility to go around,” he said in an interview. “Big banks are part of it.”


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clinton-lets-big-banks-090027093.html