Hillary Clinton's 'Tough On Wall Street' Speech Wasn't Very Tough

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She didn't tell Wall Street to "cut it out."

WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said she told Wall Street to "cut it out" during a 2007 speech she gave on the Nasdaq trading floor. The speech itself, however, is far more sympathetic to Big Finance than Clinton's presidential campaign rhetoric has suggested.

By December 2007, the economy was already in recession. Widespread abuses in the mortgage market were not a secret. Big banks had not only issued predatory loans and packaged them into disastrous securities, they had financed specialty mortgage firms who had issued their own garbage loans.

In her speech, Clinton did not absolve Wall Street of responsibility. But she didn't exactly pin the blame for what was about to become a Wall Street crisis on, you know, Wall Street.

"Now, who's exactly to blame for the housing crisis? Well, that's always a question that the press and people ask and I think there's plenty of blame to go around," Clinton said. "Wall Street may not have created the foreclosure crisis, but Wall Street certainly had a hand in making it worse."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-wall-street_us_56b423e0e4b08069c7a6c432

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