Warren is expected to take charge of the Senate Banking Committee, and Wall Street faces greater regulatory pressure.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is expected to take over as chair of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, putting Wall Street under heightened regulatory scrutiny. Warren has spent nearly two decades pressuring the financial industry, describing private equity practices as legal "looting," proposing legislation to make it easier to pursue criminal charges against corporate executives, and calling for criminal investigations of bank executives who failed to contain risk events. She has also sought to delay SpaceX's IPO, raised questions about Anthropic's potential existential risk to humanity, and pledged to investigate bankers' ties to Jeffrey Epstein and their dealings with the Trump administration. The shift matters because it signals a more confrontational stance toward banks, private equity, and capital-markets issuers. What to watch next: the committee's agenda on executive accountability and private-equity oversight, and whether Warren follows through on scrutiny of IPO timing and bank conduct.