Beat-up banks bill

Too-big-to-fail banks, better watch out: They’re looking to trim you back.

That’s if Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has her way.

Yesterday, the hard-charging lawmaker led a fresh crusade to introduce a bill that would split banks’ bread-and-butter retail activities from those done for institutions and companies.

The brainy former Harvard professor’s legislation, dubbed “the 21st Century Glass-Steagall,” is an attempt to resuscitate Depression-era legislation that was repealed in the late 1990s during the Clinton administration.

Warren, along with co-sponsors former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Maine Independent Angus King, are arguing that banks with access to taxpayer dollars are ballooning in size despite new rules rolled out in the wake of the credit crisis.

“The four biggest banks are now 30 percent larger than they were just five years ago,” Warren said.

She added that the banks continue “to engage in dangerous, high-risk practices that could once again put our economy at risk.”

Sources told The Post that the legislation has an extremely low probability of garnering attention in the Beltway because many of the Dodd-Frank regulations — passed after the financial meltdown in 2008 — have not yet been enacted.

“This is really a move about publicity,” one Washington insider told The Post. “Doing something before Dodd-Frank is enacted is just silly.”

Another Washington aide, who declined to be identified, described the bill as having “less than a zero chance of passing” into law, pointing to other failed Glass-Steagall-like bills.

Warren already has said publicly that she expects there to be resistance to the proposed legislation.

“I don’t expect anyone on this panel will jump and endorse the new Glass-Steagall bill,” Warren testified in front of a Senate Banking Committee yesterday.

Talk of reviving the 1933 legislation, named after Sen. Carter Glass (D-Va.) and Rep. Henry Steagall (R-Ala.), comes a day after regulators — including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — proposed tougher capital rules that could force the nation’s biggest banks to shrink themselves.

The move also comes as banks are set to report earnings. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo will kick off the earnings parade this morning.