Paula Dwyer: Clinton's plan on Wall Street protects husband's legacy

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Paula Dwyer: Clinton's plan on Wall Street protects husband's legacy

Increasing the statute of limitations on financial crimes to 10 years from six is legitimately hard-nosed, as are her proposals to hold bank executives accountable when subordinates break the law, and to beef up the budgets of agencies that police the markets. The dozens of recommendations, though, seem designed to avoid having to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. To call for Glass-Steagall's comeback would create a big stink: The law was eliminated during her husband's administration, and it's anathema to Wall Street banks.

In this she risks achieving little and, in some cases, causing harm. This is especially true for her two biggest and most interesting ideas -- a so-called risk fee on the largest banks and a tax on high-speed traders.

Her aim is to make these too-big-to-fail banks think twice about using leverage, peddling derivatives, packaging subprime mortgages into bonds, and the like. The problem is that this annual fee would come out of a bank's capital (money raised from the sale of stock and retained profits). Regulators, however, should want banks to have as much capital as possible to absorb losses, in the way that a homeowner with 20 percent equity in a house wouldn't be under water even if the home's market value suddenly declined by 10 percent.

If Clinton really wanted to make the financial system safer, she would require banks to have more capital, making failure less likely in the first place. Instead, a bank could interpret payment of its risk fee as a license to behave in an even riskier manner.

Many of Clinton's fellow Democrats would prefer that she keep it simple and bring back Glass-Steagall. Her many supporters on Wall Street hate that idea, so her alternative proposals allow her to protect that part of her donor base while defending her husband's legacy -- all while signaling to voters that she's no pushover. That might work politically -- at the cost of getting anything done.

Related:

Sirota and Perez: Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Policy Being Shaped By Two Bankers

Yahoo Politics: Hillary Clinton doesn’t support revival of Glass-Steagall Act

Democracy Now!: Robert Reich on Glass-Steagall and Bernie Sanders

Clinton: Cooperation, not speeches, is needed to regulate Wall Street