Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders warned on Wednesday that if he wins the White House he will “fix” the Federal Reserve by throwing bankers off its boards and increasing transparency and regulation as a way of reining in Wall Street.

Sanders criticized the pivotal decision by America’s central bank a week ago to raise interest rates for the first time in almost a decade.

He declared that the move was “the latest example of the rigged economic system”, in an opinion article for the New York Times on Wednesday.

“Wall Street is still out of control,” he said in the article.

He pointed out that most of the country’s leading financial institutions are larger now than they were during the 2008 economic catastrophe when some had to be bailed out by the government, in order to prevent global financial meltdown, because they were deemed “too big to fail”.

“If any were to fail again, taxpayers could be on the hook for another bailout, perhaps a larger one this time,” he said.

He aimed his left-leaning sights squarely at the Fed. “To rein in Wall Street, we should begin by reforming the Federal Reserve,” he said.

The Fed, which, Sanders said, oversees those institutions and uses monetary policy to promote price stability and rising employment, “has been hijacked by the very bankers it regulates”.

The senator for Vermont and foremost Democratic rival to leading candidate Hillary Clinton, argued that interest rates generally should not rise until unemployment is lower than 4%, instead of the 5% rate where it currently stands, in order not to choke off economic recovery.

He accused the central bank of being influenced by the big banks “and their supporters in Congress” as they warned repeatedly in recent years that “runaway inflation is just around the corner”.

“Raising interest rates now is a disaster for small business owners who need loans to hire more workers and Americans who need more jobs and higher wages,” he said.

He wants the Fed to oblige financial institutions to invest in the “productive economy”, forcing them to focus on lending money to businesses and consumers.

That could be achieved by prohibiting commercial banks from “gambling with the bank deposits of the American people”, he said.

And also by taking away their incentive to stash excess reserves with the Fed in return for interest, which has created an “insane” pot of $2.4tn that is not circulating in the economy, he said.

Meanwhile Sanders flagged as a conflict of interest the fact that executives at some of the largest financial institutions commonly serve as directors of the Fed – their regulator-in-chief.

“If I were elected president, the foxes would no longer guard the henhouse,” he said.

In order to shake up the central bank’s governance system and appoint board members from “all walks of life” its directors should be nominated by the president and chosen by the US Senate, he said.

That would echo the system used to pick the chair of the reserve, the post currently occupied by Janet Yellen, who announced last week’s 0.25% rise in interest rates.

Republican candidates for president are also wont to criticize the Federal Reserve, but for the opposite reasons from Sanders.

Broadly, they want a lighter hand on Wall Street and the economy and higher interest rates.

House Republicans accuse Yellen of politicizing the chairmanship and using her position to advance liberal goals.

But Sanders and leading Republicans strongly agree that the Fed should be more transparent.

Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul voted to delay Yellen’s confirmation in January 2014 as he pushed for the Fed to be audited.

He was not successful either in delaying her appointment or persuading Congress to take up the issue of scrutiny over the bank.

But in his latest attempt at greater oversight, Paul did introduce a bill earlier in 2015 that would expose the Fed’s monetary policy discussions and decisions to congressional audit. That bill comes up for its first procedural vote in the Senate in January 2016.

For Sanders, one way forward is to mandate that full transcripts of the meetings of the federal open market committee, which determines the direction of monetary policy, be published within six months of deliberations, not five years under the current system.

“If we had made this reform in 2004, the American people would have learned about the housing bubble well in advance of the financial crisis,” he argued.

Sanders ultimately wants more regulation beyond the Fed, limiting what commercial banks can do with their customers’ money and breaking up the largest institutions that would threaten the economy if they collapsed.

But, starting with the Fed, he warned: “The sad reality is that the Federal Reserve doesn’t regulate Wall Street; Wall Street regulates the Fed. It’s time to make banking work … for all Americans, not just a handful of wealthy speculators.”