Dear Commons Community, 

Hillary Clinton put the fight for higher wages for everyday Americans at the heart of her economic agenda yesterday and talked tough against Wall Street in the first major economic policy speech of her White House bid. As reported by several news outlets:

“Clinton said the U.S. economy will only run at full steam when middle-class wages rise steadily along with executive salaries and company profits.

“I believe we have to build a growth-and-fairness economy. You can’t have one without the other,” she said at The New School in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

“Corporate profits are at near-record highs and Americans are working as hard as ever but paychecks have barely budged in real terms. Families today are stretched in so many directions and so are their budgets,” Clinton said.

The former secretary of state promised to push for a broader reform of the U.S. corporate tax code.

She talked tough against Wall Street, promising to go beyond the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that imposed stronger regulations on the financial industry.

“Too many of our major financial institutions are still too complex and too risky and the problems are not limited to the big banks that get all the headlines,” she said.

Clinton warned that “serious risks are emerging from institutions in the so-called shadow banking system including hedge funds, high-frequency traders, non-bank finance companies” and other entities “which receive little oversight at all.”

She will unveil more specifics of her economic policy in a series of speeches in coming weeks.

Tony