Could the US be heading towards an Elizabethan era? [View all]

by Simon Carswell

There is a popular video on YouTube, viewed more than one million times, showing a group of hapless financial regulators squirming under questioning by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren.

At her first congressional banking committee hearing in February since winning a Senate seat last year, Warren grilled big-bank regulators on why they had never taken a Wall Street giant to court.

“There are districts attorneys and US attorneys who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it,” she told them. “I am really concerned that too big to fail has become too big for trial.”

The Democratic senator’s attacks on the recovering influence of Wall Street, surging student debt, consumer protection and the deepening divide between the rich and working classes in the US have invigorated the party’s core supporters and raised hopes that she might run for president in 2016.

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http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/could-the-us-be-heading-towards-an-elizabethan-era-1.1596727