Vice President Joe Biden is on the road today for a swing through Florida, before heading to Pennsylvania next week and then to the Big Apple to appear on Stephen Colbert's new "Late Show." That sort of schedule, of course, has only served to further inflate the Biden 2016 boomlet that developed in recent weeks, which has neatly coincided with some Democrats wringing their hands over the ongoing faux-saga of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails.

Team Biden insists the trip has nothing to do with 2016 (and that could very well be true). But until he gives a definitive answer as to whether he is running or not, the Biden speculation is going to stay at a constant hum, at least until some votes are cast.

Not that there's any real reason for Biden to be placed on a pedestal as the obvious Clinton alternative. In fact, while there are plenty of good reasons that Biden should stay out of the race, the most convincing is that, in terms of actual policy stances, he's pretty much Clinton, except older and male (and, to be fair, with a few foreign policy differences). And one similarity in particular makes Biden especially ill-suited for jumping into the fray in 2016.

A key knock against Clinton is that she is one of Wall Street's favorite Democrats. Her time as a senator representing New York, and the fact that her husband's administration played a key role in the financial industry deregulation that led to the 2008 economic meltdown, don't exactly endear her to those who rightly feel that the financial sector got away with too much for too long before the crisis and still plays an outsized role in the economy.

When it comes to those issues, Biden is little better. He was a key Democratic voice in the passage of a 2005 bill that made it harder to declare bankruptcy, which consumer advocates then and now have derided as a sweetheart deal for the financial industry. (Clinton backed an earlier version of the bill in the Senate, though said she opposed the 2005 version; then-Sen. Barack Obama voted against it.) He also has long ties to the credit card industry; one credit card issuer that is now owned by Bank of America was his largest corporate campaign contributor between 1989 and 2010, according to the New York Times. Similar concerns arose about Biden in 2008, when he was named to the presidential ticket.

Some of this is, of course, a function of the fact that he represented Delaware, a big tax haven where financial companies love to settle down due to its laxer laws on interest rates; it can certainly be argued that Biden was acting in the best interests of his state, if not everyone else. And Biden and his team point to the successes of the Obama administration when it comes to reining in the financial industry – including the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and a 2009 law that added important consumer protections to credit cards – as evidence that he isn't hesitant to stand up to banks or their money.

But this is just one more way in which Biden fails to distinguish himself from Clinton, and on an issue that is vitally important not only to an ascendant wing of the Democratic Party, but also to the country's economic future. As I've noted before, Wall Street reform is not a done deal yet, and what's known as the financialization of the economy – the drift of money away from productive uses and into paper-pushing on Wall Street – is a problem that needs a solution. (Read this piece by Michael Konczal for all the sobering stats.) There's nothing in Biden's record to indicate that he is the guy to carry through on either.