USA TODAY Column: …In her new memoir, A Fighting Chance, out this week, Warren relates that she was so nervous she was ill in the little bathroom offstage. After she was led to the set and pointed to an opening onto the stage, “I stepped out into the lights feeling like an astronaut who had just left the space capsule — except that I hadn’t practiced this maneuver back on my home planet.”…
After she floundered through the interview with Stewart, the host offered her a chance to take some extra time to really get her message across. Warren recounts what her message was: “This crisis didn’t have to happen,” she said. After a cycle of financial booms and busts culminated in the Great Depression, “the country put tough rules in place that gave us fifty years without a financial crisis. But in the 1980s, we started pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric, and we found ourselves back in the boom-and-bust cycle.”…
Warren relates that when she was helping to set up the CFPB and spending some time in the Treasury Department, staffers there would stop her in the hall with various versions of this comment: “You don’t know me, but I was working in the XX section during the financial crisis. When we talked about what we should do, someone always seemed to ask, ‘What will Elizabeth Warren say when she finds out about this?'”… (more)
