 When she was campaigning to become the next U.S. senator to represent Massachusetts, Democrat Elizabeth Warren pledged that she would take her tough talk about enforcing Wall Street regulations to Washington and put them into action. Looking at the seven regulators arrayed before the Senate Banking Committee, and noting that she had often sat at the same witness table before becoming a senator, she used her new power to question why the federal government has not been more aggressive. “The question I really want to ask is about how tough you are — about how much leverage you really have,” Warren said. After much conjecture and discussion, the answer from Securities and Exchange Commission regulators was that no banks have actually been taken to trial despite the wrongdoings that led to the financial collapse of 2008. Republicans had been expected to use the hearing to attack the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government agency whose creation that Warren had championed, especially since one of the witnesses was the agency’s director, Richard Cordray. The GOP members stuck to broad lines of questioning and did not specifically assail the consumer agency. “If [banks] can break the law and drag in billions in profits and then turn around and settle paying out of those profits, they don’t have that much incentive to follow the law.” 
 
 The regulators often sought to avoid directly answering Warren’s questions regarding their prosecutions. That is, if they are too complex either for their own institutions to manage them or for the regulators to manage them." “We do not have to bring people to trial.” 
 
 “I appreciate that you say you do not have to bring people to trial,” Warren countered. “My question is when did you bring them to trial?” 
 
 At another point, Elisse Walter, chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, defended her agency, saying, “We look at the distinction between what we can get if we go to trial and what we can get if we don’t.” 
 
 Warren interrupted her: “I appreciate that. Warren had pledged to help rein in wrongdoing by big banks when she ran for the Senate last year, and the financial industry poured millions into the campaign coffers of Warren’s Republican opponent — then-Senator Scott Brown — to keep her out of office. meeting with bank regulators Thursday left bankers reeling, after she questioned why regulators had not prosecuted a bank since the financial crisis. "There are district attorneys and U.S. 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," Warren said. As for taking on banks, she added, “I’m really concerned ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial.’ That just seems wrong to me.” 
 
 Warren’s performance drew the praise of some fellow Democrats, including Jon Tester of Montana. President Obama appointed Cordray over Warren to head the regulator after Senate Republicans vowed to block her nomination. Warren then won her Senate seat, from which she said she will continue the fight for financial regulations.
– Elizabeth Warren has kept a low national profile in her first month on the job as a senator, but that changed yesterday at a hearing in which she grilled federal regulators of Wall Street, reports the Boston Globe and MassLive. In the exchange getting the most attention, Warren noted that civil cases against banks usually end with legal settlements, and asked, "When did you last take ... a large financial institution, a Wall Street bank, to trial?" When nobody spoke up immediately, she asked, "Anybody?" The answers that followed generally danced around the question, but it became clear that banks rarely get prosecuted. "There are district 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," said Warren. (The Huffington Post notes that Internet activist Aaron Swartz was a Warren constituent before his suicide.) "I've very concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial' and that just seems wrong to me." Many on Wall Street are now accusing her of grandstanding at the hearing, notes a separate HuffPo article.