Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated she would let banks fail and not bail them out as president on Tuesday’s broadcast of CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Hillary was asked, “You put forth a plan for reforming Wall Street, and Wall Street embraced it. Is that a good sign?”
She responded, “Well, I’m not sure who you’re talking about, because I certainly didn’t get that message if they did. Paul Krugman, you know the columnist for the New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist said that I came out with a tough, comprehensive, effective plan. Because what I did, which is really looking at the problems that we have, and trying to preempt the problems of the future is to recognize that, you know, we don’t just have big banks in our economy that pull a lot of strings and make a lot of decisions. Look at what happened in ’08, we had a big insurance company that had to be bailed out. We had an investment bank, Lehman Brothers, that failed. We have to look at the whole financial system, and my plan does that.”
She was then asked, “If you’re president, and the banks are failing, do we let them fail this time?”
Hillary responded by saying “yes” repeatedly, before continuing, “First of all, under Dodd-Frank, that is what will happen, because we now have stress tests, and I’m going to impose a risk fee on the big bank if they engage in what — risky behavior. But they have to know, their shareholders have to know, that, yes, they will fail. And if they’re too big to fail, then under my plan, and others that have been proposed, they may have to be broken up, because, if you can’t manage it, then it’s more likely to fail.”
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