Elizabeth Warren: The Unfinished Business of Financial Reform

Remarks at the Levy Institute’s 24th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you all for being here today.

We’re here to ask a critical question at a critical time: what are we to make of Dodd-Frank five years later? To answer that question, I think we should start by looking at how the government responded to the last major financial crisis – the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

After the 1929 crash, policymakers diagnosed what had gone wrong and changed the laws to make sure that excessive speculation and risk-taking on Wall Street couldn’t push the economy over a cliff.