Near­ly nine months ago, Hillary Clin­ton was first asked to release the tran­scripts of her paid speech­es to Wall Street firms, for which she received $225,000 a pop. Spec­u­la­tion abound­ed about just what she said at the closed-door events. ​“Now if you give a speech for $225,000, it must be a pret­ty damn good speech,” Bernie Sanders remarked back in April. ​“And that is why I believe Sec­re­tary Clin­ton should share that speech with all of us.”

Obama campaigned as a candidate who would get tough on Wall Street. But upon taking office, he immediately set about staffing his economic team with Wall Street-friendly industry insiders.

Now, thanks to the lat­est Wik­iLeaks release, the pub­lic has final­ly been able to read what appears to be a sam­pling of the speech­es’ con­tents. A Clin­ton cam­paign staffer had excerpt­ed the most polit­i­cal­ly dam­ag­ing sec­tions back in Jan­u­ary, which were leaked last week. The excerpts sug­gest that if elect­ed pres­i­dent, Clin­ton would car­ry on many of the Oba­ma administration’s worst ten­den­cies on Wall Street and eco­nom­ic issues.

In sev­er­al speech­es, Clin­ton spoke of the need to let Wall Street reform and reg­u­late itself. In a speech giv­en to Deutsche Bank in Octo­ber 2014, speak­ing of the need to reign in ​“excess­es in the econ­o­my,” Clin­ton told atten­dees: ​“Today, there’s more that can and should be done that real­ly has to come from the indus­try itself.”

The year before that, at a Gold­man Sachs-spon­sored sym­po­sium, Clin­ton dis­cussed the need to strike the right bal­ance on finan­cial reg­u­la­tion: not too lit­tle and not too much. ​“How do you get to the gold­en key, how do we fig­ure out what works?” she said. ​“The peo­ple that know the indus­try bet­ter than any­body are the peo­ple who work in the indus­try.” In the same speech, Clin­ton called the idea that the U.S. bank­ing sys­tem caused the 2008 finan­cial crash an ​“over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion.”

These words sug­gest that as pres­i­dent, Clin­ton is like­ly to fol­low Barack Obama’s lead when it comes to finan­cial reg­u­la­tion. Oba­ma cam­paigned as a can­di­date who would get tough on Wall Street, and ear­ly in his term con­tin­ued crit­i­ciz­ing the ​“fat cat bankers on Wall Street” who ​“don’t get it.” But upon tak­ing office, Oba­ma imme­di­ate­ly set about staffing his eco­nom­ic team with Wall Street-friend­ly indus­try insiders.

Giv­ing aid and com­fort to Wall Street

Obama’s appoint­ments were the very epit­o­me of the phi­los­o­phy that ​“the peo­ple that know the indus­try bet­ter than any­body are the peo­ple who work in the industry.”

Oba­ma named Tim­o­thy Gei­th­n­er, for instance, as his Trea­sury Sec­re­tary. Gei­th­n­er, who became known to bankers as their ​“man in Wash­ing­ton,” was a pro­tégé of Robert Rubin, a for­mer Cit­i­group chair­man and Gold­man Sachs CEO. As Bill Clinton’s Trea­sury Sec­re­tary, Rubin had worked to pre­vent the reg­u­la­tion of the very same deriv­a­tives mar­ket that con­tributed to the 2008 crash, as well as pushed to repeal the Glass-Stea­gall Act that for decades had kept invest­ment and com­mer­cial bank­ing sep­a­rate. Its repeal helped pave the way for the mas­sive, hyper-com­plex banks that became too big to fail and, if it did­n’t cause the 2008 crash, it cer­tain­ly deep­ened the crash’s impact .

In addi­tion to this, Lar­ry Sum­mers, also a Rubin under­study who had helped Rubin pre­vent deriv­a­tives reg­u­la­tion in the ​‘90s, was named senior White House eco­nom­ic advis­er. Rubin’s son, James, and Michael Fro­man, anoth­er Cit­i­group exec­u­tive, were tapped by Oba­ma to name his eco­nom­ic team. He also re-nom­i­nat­ed Bush appointee Ben Bernanke as chair­man of the Fed­er­al Reserve and lat­er appoint­ed Mary Jo White, a for­mer part­ner at a Wall Street defense firm, as head of the SEC.

“Some of the ear­ly nom­i­na­tions that he made were also com­fort­ing to Wall Street,” Wall Street lawyer Rod­gin Cohen lat­er said . ​“Wall Street viewed Gei­th­n­er, Bernanke, Sum­mers as a com­mit­ment by the incom­ing admin­is­tra­tion to bal­ance a cen­trist view, not lean­ing way to the left.”

Gei­th­n­er, who report­ed­ly was in con­tact with the CEO of Cit­i­group as he helped design the Bush administration’s bank bailout in 2008 and through­out the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion’s sub­se­quent response to the finan­cial cri­sis, ensured that finan­cial insti­tu­tions would receive bil­lions of dol­lars with no strings attached, while poor home­own­ers received a frac­tion of the total bailout funds.

Not only that, but the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion failed to crim­i­nal­ly pros­e­cute senior Wall Street exec­u­tives for the wide­spread fraud that helped tip the U.S. finan­cial sys­tem into col­lapse, despite moun­tains of evidence.

Per­haps most noto­ri­ous­ly, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion failed even to pros­e­cute HSBC Bank for help­ing Latin Amer­i­can drug car­tels laun­der bil­lions of dol­lars due to its large size and ​“ sys­temic impor­tance ” — the doc­trine of ​“too big to jail.” The admin­is­tra­tion also declined to break up the largest finan­cial insti­tu­tions, leav­ing, as Bernie Sanders fre­quent­ly allud­ed to in his speech­es, 11 of the top 15 banks that received bailout mon­ey in 2008 big­ger now than they were when they were orig­i­nal­ly con­sid­ered ​“too big to fail.” Today, the unreg­u­lat­ed deriv­a­tives mar­ket con­tin­ues to grow , while hedge funds are turn­ing to new risky finan­cial products.

Pass­ing the baton

Much as Oba­ma raised more mon­ey from the finan­cial indus­try in 2008 than any oth­er can­di­date in his­to­ry, Clin­ton has raked in by far the most mon­ey from Wall Street this elec­tion sea­son, with near­ly one third of total Wall Street dona­tions in 2015 going to her cam­paign. Cou­ple that with Clinton’s pri­vate com­ments to mem­bers of the indus­try, and it’s dif­fi­cult to see why the out­come under a Clin­ton pres­i­den­cy would be any dif­fer­ent than an Oba­ma one.

Clin­ton looks to be fol­low­ing Obama’s lega­cy in anoth­er way, as well. In two sep­a­rate speech­es, Clin­ton praised the work of the Simp­son-Bowles Com­mis­sion, set up by Oba­ma in 2010 as part of his ongo­ing quest to cre­ate a ​“ grand bar­gain ” with the Repub­li­cans to cut the nation­al debt. The unpop­u­lar plan, drawn up by for­mer Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Alan Simp­son and for­mer Clin­ton Chief of Staff Ersk­ine Bowles, failed to get enough sup­port in Con­gress and died.

In a speech for finan­cial ser­vices firm Mor­gan Stan­ley in April 2013, Clin­ton told the audi­ence that the com­mis­sion ​“put forth the right frame­work.” While the ​“specifics can be nego­ti­at­ed and argued over,” she said, ​“the big ele­ments of it were right,” name­ly its aim to restrain spend­ing, cre­ate ade­quate rev­enues and incen­tivize growth.

The Simp­son-Bowles plan was a clas­sic case of ​“cen­trist” deficit cut­ting that square­ly took aim at ​“enti­tle­ments.” It would have raised the retire­ment age, cut Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits by chang­ing the infla­tion for­mu­la and raised the Medicare eli­gi­bil­i­ty age, all while cut­ting the cor­po­rate tax rate. At the time, econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man — an ardent Clin­ton sup­port­er— called it a ​“ter­ri­ble” plan that was ​“some­thing the cen­ter-right and the hard right can agree on,” and charged that the Belt­way insid­ers prais­ing the plan were ​“the same peo­ple who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fis­cal prayers.”

Some have argued that Clin­ton was mere­ly prais­ing the gen­er­al aims of the com­mis­sion in the speech­es, rather than the specifics of cut­ting Social Secu­ri­ty. Devoid of con­text, this may sound rea­son­able. But the Simp­son-Bowles plan can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from its goal of cut­ting wel­fare programs.

Accord­ing to its two archi­tects in 2012 , the deal would have been the per­fect moment to ​“do some­thing big to reduce the deficit, reform our tax code and fix our enti­tle­ment pro­grams.” Or as Bloomberg put it in describ­ing Simp­son and Bowles’ road trip around the coun­try lec­tur­ing Amer­i­cans about the plan: ​“Audi­ences get an ear­ful about Wash­ing­ton profli­ga­cy, the polit­i­cal system’s cow­ardice and the need to take an ax to a whole array of sup­pos­ed­ly sacro­sanct programs.”

When you com­bine that with the fact that the cam­paign to push the plan was financed and chaired by exec­u­tives from Wall Street firms like Gold­man Sachs, JP Mor­gan Chase, Cit­i­group and, yes, Mor­gan Stan­ley — the very firm to whom Clin­ton was singing the prais­es of the plan (and on whose board Bowles sat) — it beg­gars belief that she was not sup­port­ing the commission’s vision of slash­ing ​“enti­tle­ments.”

The Clin­ton cam­paign has tried to make a virtue out of fol­low­ing in Obama’s foot­steps through­out the elec­tion cycle, fram­ing itself as the inher­i­tor of the Oba­ma administration’s lega­cy. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as Clinton’s pri­vate words to her Wall Street financiers make clear, that means also embrac­ing some of the administration’s most harm­ful policies.