Bernie Sanders has made a name for himself by pushing in his presidential campaign for fundamental changes to the way financial institutions operate within the U.S.: He wants to reform the Federal Reserve, make ratings agencies nonprofits, and close the revolving door between Wall Street and government agencies. In a speech on Tuesday, he detailed plans—all of them highly ambitious, and many of them outside the purview of the president—that he hopes would make the banking system much more accessible to average Americans.

To Sanders, credit-card interest rates that top 20 percent and ATM fees as high as $5 are unacceptable. “The Bible has a term for this practice. It’s called usury. And in The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates,” he said. Sanders said that if he were elected president, he’d push for a 15-percent cap on all credit-card interest rates and consumer loans, mirroring the rate cap credit unions must abide by for loans. And ATM fees, he said, shouldn’t be more than $2. “Big banks need to stop acting like loan sharks and start acting like responsible lenders,” he said.

Sanders’s plans represent an aggressive approach to rampant and growing economic inequality. But if he were elected president, his power to implement them would actually be quite limited. Many financial products are regulated at the state level, and when they aren’t, they are often governed by a federal agency such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, notes Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia. “There’s not much a president can do for some of these things. As far as tinkering around with those usury rates, that is far outside of the realm of the executive office,” she says. Instead, a president would have to push for this agenda and then encourage regulatory agencies to carry out the reforms.