Obama: ‘I told you so’ speech to Wall St., reforms can’t wait

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Obama: ‘I told you so’ speech to Wall Street

WASHINGTON — In an “I told you so” moment, President Barack Obama says he warned of the financial turmoil facing the country without dramatic financial industry reforms.

“As I said two years ago on this stage,” the president recalled at New York’s Cooper Union college, “… a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.”

Obama was at the college Thursday in a reprise of his speech as a presidential candidate that called for financial reforms that he says could have headed off the nation’s worst economic crisis in generations.