By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton made her most ringing endorsement yet of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren's efforts to tamp down on "Wall Street's irresponsible risk taking" in a two-paragraph Time magazine article on Thursday.
"She never hesitates to hold powerful people's feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants," Clinton, the clear front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for president, wrote in an apparent wink to herself.
Clinton is yet to reveal what economic policies she would bring to the White House if elected, but much of her rhetoric in recent days has had echoes of Warren, a hero of the Democrat's progressive left wing.
"Elizabeth Warren never lets us forget that the work of taming Wall Street's irresponsible risk taking and reforming our financial system is far from finished," Clinton wrote in Time after the magazine named Warren, a former Harvard law professor and a senator for Massachusetts, one of the world's 100 most influential people.
Whether the former secretary of state's apparent fondness for Warren extends to an embrace of any of the policies championed by the senator to increase Wall Street regulation remains unclear.
While Clinton has already said fighting growing income inequality in the United States is a top priority, she has not said how she would achieve this as president. How much she might differ from the more centrist policies adopted by her husband, Bill Clinton, in the 1990s when he was president is unknown.
She has not had a role in shaping economic policy since the 2000s, when she was one of the two U.S. senators from New York and counted the bankers of Wall Street among her constituents.
Warren has a relatively small but vocal and politically active group of supporters, and her speeches denouncing Wall Street recklessness have sometimes been swapped enthusiastically on social media websites.
It was not immediately clear on Thursday how Clinton came to write the blurb for Time about Warren.