Can Hillary or Bernie really take on Wall Street successfully?

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/they-talk-tough-can-bernie-or-hillary-actually-take-wall-street-and-win?akid=13986.294211.zaRAK6&rd=1&src=newsletter1050870&t=2

Ed Kane teaches finance at Boston College and is a grantee of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He studies the dangerous risks posed by big banks and sees the current system as hurting taxpayers and favoring the interests of megabankers and financiers. Recently, the financial reform proposals of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have gotten a flurry of press. Will either of them make us safer? Are economic experts using their professional expertise to judge them or blowing political and philosophical smoke? Ed Kane discusses these issues and more. This interview was originally published on the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s blog.

Lynn Parramore: The movie 'The Big Short' showed the recklessness of bankers and financiers leading up to the crisis. Yet nobody has gone to jail, proposed reforms are mostly second-order, and the banks have tried to roll back parts of the Dodd-Frank Act. Some of those efforts have been successful, like a rule meant to protect us from just the sort of deals shown in the movie. Do you think the opinion that little has changed is justified?

Ed Kane: Yes, I do. We’ve seen a reform program that favors big banks. Dodd-Frank has hurt small banks and futures commission merchants because it places new burdens of regulation on them such as the need to hire specialized compliance officers. Dodd-Frank is very complicated. Ironically, rather than disciplining big banks, these complications have ended up making big banks more dominant than ever before.