What's the Real 800-Pound Gorilla in this Election? Wall Street.

The Daily Beast today has a good run-down of the latest efforts -- books by former Washington insiders such as Neil Barofsky, Sheila Bair, and former Sen. Ted Kaufman -- to remind the public that the Obama administration and the Congress have failed to change Wall Street in any substantial way, despite the worst-ever financial crash in U.S. history (yes, worse in loss of wealth, actually, than 1929).

On the contrary, as I have been writing since the signing of the Dodd-Frank law in June of 2010, the biggest banks have only gotten stronger and more dominant in the last four years since the crash, and there have been NO prosecutions for criminal wrongdoing related to the giant securities fraud perpetuated on the public during the 2000s. As I put it in 2010 in a piece for Newsweek/Daily Beast:  

"Whereas Glass-Steagall substantially altered the structure of the financial system and required the creation of brand-new kinds of firms, Dodd-Frank effectively anoints the existing banking elite. The bill makes it likely that they will be the future giants of banking as well. ... By imposing new capital charges that will create barriers to entry for new firms, especially in swaps and other derivatives, while at the same time permitting giant bank holding companies to continue controlling most of what they were before, 'we’ve consolidated the position of the five banks that were most central to the crisis,' a former Treasury official says—in other words: J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, along with, currently, Wells Fargo. 'In my mind,' he says, 'they’ve created six new GSEs,' or government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

And now, squaring the circle of deference to the biggest banks, challenger Mitt Romney has apparently decided not to come out with a new alternative of his own to Dodd-Frank, as I write in this week's National Journal, and "it’s a fair bet that Romney would align himself with Republicans on Capitol Hill who tend to back the big banks’ opposition to some of the most costly provisions of Dodd-Frank such as the Volcker Rule, which is the closest thing that regulators offered to the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law  reducing the size and influence of banks."

More than four years into a desultory economy delivered to us by these Wall Street giants, and with a month to go in a very consequential election, both sides are still talking around the problem. Nor are you  likely to hear much about this gorilla over the next 30 days, simply because neither candidate, Obama or Romney, is terribly proud of where he stands.