Getty Barney Frank advising Clinton on Wall Street plan The Democratic presidential front-runner is close to outlining her vision for policing the financial system

Hillary Clinton is putting the Dodd-Frank band back together.

The Democratic presidential front-runner is close to outlining her vision for policing the financial system, building on 2010's sweeping post-crisis regulatory overhaul known as Dodd-Frank. One of the bill's namesake authors, former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), has been giving input to Clinton's campaign about her plan in recent weeks.


Frank told POLITICO on Wednesday that he has been working with campaign staff including Gary Gensler — a key ally in the eyes of Dodd-Frank supporters and often a foe of big banks during his time as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives markets.

"He was a major formulator in this plan," Frank said of Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs partner and a Treasury Department official during Bill Clinton's presidency.

The input of Frank and Gensler could help Clinton's standing among Democrats aligned with Wall Street critic Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, and allay any lingering concerns that Clinton would go easy on a sector that her husband helped deregulate before the 2007-09 crisis that prompted the passage of Dodd-Frank.

In Iowa on Tuesday, Clinton gave a brief preview of the direction of the plan, which she said would be released "in the next week." Clinton was responding to a question about whether she would try to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and investment banking activities — an idea backed by Warren and Clinton's Democratic primary competitor Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Clinton said, "Big banks are not the only things we have to worry about." She said she also wants to target risks among insurance companies, hedge funds and other entities in the so-called shadow banking sector. Clinton added that she was willing to work to change the law to make sure individuals are held accountable for financial wrongdoing.

"What she has proposed is in the spirit of Glass-Steagall but in contemporary terms," Frank said. "The Glass-Steagall debate is an artificial debate at this point. It's 85 years old. Most people can see if we had it in effect, it wouldn't have stopped AIG. It wouldn't stop subprime mortgages that shouldn't have been granted."

While he declined to get ahead of the campaign with details of the plan, Frank said he expects Clinton to push to expand the powers of a panel of top regulators known as the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which decides what firms outside of the traditional banking sector are so big that they pose a risk to the entire financial system. Dodd-Frank created the panel, which is led by the Treasury secretary and includes the heads of agencies such as the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The law also authorized the panel to suggest that other regulators craft new rules.

According to Frank, who is also a POLITICO columnist, Clinton wants to "give the FSOC the power to order one of the other regulators to do something if it doesn't follow the recommendation." The change would require new legislation in Congress, where FSOC has accumulated critics on both sides of the aisle after attempting to ratchet up oversight of firms that aren't banks, such as insurers AIG, Prudential Financial and MetLife. The asset management industry, including big fund managers like BlackRock, have been lobbying to avoid being targeted by the panel.

Asked about other potential areas that Clinton could address, Frank said more work could be done to address concerns about hedge funds.

A Clinton spokesman and Gensler did not respond to requests for comment.

Frank, who has been making appearances in the news media and on Capitol Hill with former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) to mark July's fifth anniversary of the financial overhaul law, said he first talked to Clinton after lawmakers attached a Dodd-Frank rollback to a must-pass spending bill in December — a move opposed, unsuccessfully, by Warren, Frank and other liberal Democrats. In January, Clinton tweeted that "Attacking financial reform is risky and wrong."

Since then, Frank has kept in touch and been a part of conference calls with Gensler, who played a key role in implementing Dodd-Frank, to work out the specifics of Clinton's proposals.

"I've been in touch with her staff on this for most of the past month and made suggestions," Frank said Wednesday when asked about Clinton's upcoming policy plan. "It builds on what we did."