Bernie Sanders, Speaking in New York, Is Expected to Call for Financial Overhauls

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Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont speaking at an event in Amherst, Mass., on Saturday.Credit Mary Schwalm/Reuters

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont often bemoans the influence of “millionaires and billionaires” in America, and on Tuesday, he will be just a couple of miles from Wall Street to make his case for a major overhaul of the financial system.

Mr. Sanders will visit The Town Hall, a 1,500-seat venue near Times Square, at 2 p.m., where he is expected to speak for about an hour. According to excerpts of his speech, Mr. Sanders as president would direct the Treasury Department to establish a list of “too big to fail” commercial banks, shadow banks and insurance companies, and would break them up during his first year in office.

“Greed is not good,” Mr. Sanders is expected to say.

Mr. Sanders, an independent who has unveiled a raft of progressive proposals, has not offered a comprehensive explanation of how he would pay for his plans to expand Social Security and make public universities tuition-free. He has suggested lifting the cap on taxable income for people earning more than $250,000, and he has called for stopping companies from stashing money in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.

Speaking on CNN over the weekend, Mr. Sanders promised to share more details in the buildup to the Iowa caucuses next month.

Although Mr. Sanders has painted himself as a thorn in the side of Wall Street, Hillary Clinton, his rival for the nomination, says that he does not go far enough. Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of her campaign and a former regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said on Monday that Mr. Sanders had been too “hands off” when it came to taking on certain types of banks.

“Any plan to further reform our financial system must include strong provisions to tackle risks in the ‘shadow banking’ sector, which remains a critical source of potential instability in our economy,” Mr. Gensler said. “Senator Sanders should go beyond his existing plans for reforming Wall Street and endorse Hillary Clinton’s tough, comprehensive proposals to rein in risky behavior within the shadow banking sector.”

Mr. Sanders does not appear ready to make such an endorsement.

“Senator Sanders won’t be taking advice on how to regulate Wall Street from a former Goldman Sachs partner and a former Treasury Department official who helped Wall Street rig the system,” Michael Briggs, a spokesman for the Sanders campaign, said of Mr. Gensler.