Noam Scheiber wrote a fantastic political profile of Elizabeth Warren but bundled it with a much newsier argument about how she might run for president even if Hillary Clinton does. This created much buzz on a week that needed it; this also made very little sense, as I tried to explain in a response piece.
Charlie Pierce joined me in the peanut gallery, sniping away at the trope that “running for president” was the only natural way for Warren to up her influence. Ben White and Maggie Haberman actually reported out the speculation, which did produce this amusing quote.
“The nightmare scenario for banks is to hear these arguments from a candidate on the far left and on the far right,” said Jaret Seiberg, a financial services industry analyst at Guggenheim Partners. “Suddenly you have Elizabeth Warren screaming about ‘too big to fail’ on one side and Rand Paul screaming about it on the other side and then candidates in the middle are forced to weigh in.”
To me, that quote just emphasizes that bankers are the whiniest people on the planet. It would be Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren’s doing if the banks got “screamed at”? The banks aren’t unpopular enough on their own—otherwise, they’d expect to buy off candidates to get back to their pre-2007 public esteem? Sorry, that just seems unachievable. It would be better for the banks if hyped “anti-bank” candidates ran and lost by landslides.
