A little background is needed for WikiLeaks' leak of purported speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to Wall Street bankers for a considerable fee. These speeches, which were posted by BuzzFeed this Friday, and which revealed nothing a Bernie Sanders supporter did not know already (Clinton is down with the bankers of Wall Street and free trade), did not happen in a vacuum but were consistent with a political program that was actually initiated by Jimmy Carter at the end of the 1970s (he appointed Paul Volker to serve as Chairman of the Federal Reserve) and accelerated by Volker and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. This political program is called neoliberalism.

Around 1980, the financial sector in the US exploded. Stock prices shot through the roof and borrowing became very big business (from government finance to home equity loans to credit card debt). The main reason for this "financial explosion" was policy changes by Volker and Reagan's aggressive deregulation of the banking sector. The reason the market had been regulated in the first place was to prevent another Great Crash of 1929. These regulations did actually stabilize the US economy from 1947 to 1987—the year the first big crash of the de-regulated era occurred. There are a lot of theories about why the 1980s presented the political opportunity for financialization (I go with the Monthly Review's theory of stagnation), but it resulted in a close and deeply undemocratic relationship between Wall Street and Washington. This relationship became known as the revolving door.

In 1997, Bill Clinton ended the last important piece of post-Great Crash legislation, the Glass–Steagall Act of 1932 (it separated commercial banking from investment banking). After that termination, Wall Street had two massive economic crashes, in 2001 and 2008. While running for president in 2008, Obama promised to reform Wall Street (meaning, reintroduce regulations), but once in power he failed to make meaningful changes to this system. Indeed, his program of quantitative easing (QE is basically the government buying bonds for the purpose of giving banks more liquidity), kept the value of paper in equity markets artificially high. QE benefited the bankers more than the public, who would have benefited from increased fiscal/social spending (building high-speed rail lines, robustly funding research and development, repairing aging infrastructure, and so on).

If these are indeed speeches Hillary Clinton delivered to Wall Street bankers, then they indicate that the well-known revolving door between Wall Street and Washington will not stop turning under her leadership. This, as BuzzFeed notes, is exactly what Bernie Sanders and his supporters have been saying from the very beginning, and why they wanted her to make these speeches public during the race for the Democratic nomination. Clinton is much too close to bankers and their policies, which have, over all, worsened inequality in the US by supporting bonus culture and shareholder value maximization.

The important thing to notice in this leak is this: Though Clinton is well aware of the problems with bonus culture and an unregulated derivatives market, she still thinks bankers should be responsible for regulating themselves. This makes no sense. For example, she said this at a Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd event on September 2, 2014:

When I was a Senator from New York, I represented and worked with so many talented principled people who made their living in finance. But even thought I represented them and did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay. I also was calling in ‘06, ‘07 for doing something about the mortgage crisis, because I saw every day from Wall Street literally to main streets across New York how a well-functioning financial system is essential. So when I raised about early warnings about subprime mortgages and called for regulating derivatives and over complex financial products, I didn’t get some big arguments, because people sort of said, no, that makes sense. But boy, have we had fights about it ever since.

But she said this at a Goldman Sachs symposium on October 24, 2013:

There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.

This is basically what Wall Street wants to hear. This is thieves policing thieves.

But what all of this shows is that, if Clinton wins big and Donald Trump burns out completely, the GOP/Dem political system will likely be replaced by a new one defined by Sander's social democratic agenda (a return to the New Deal and the democratic management of the financial sector) and Clinton's neoliberalism (politics as it has been since Jimmy Carter). As for the GOP, it will go to the graveyard with Trump and social conservatives (or overt white supremacy). In this new Sanders/Clinton climate, these leaks will have much more relevance than they do at this moment—a moment when the struggle is still between Republicans and Democrats (meaning, between two parties that are essentially the same when it comes to bankers and markets but are different when it comes to social/cultural values). If Trump wins, however, expect more deregulation, an empowered social conservatism, and a neoliberalism that's challenged by no major party.