On the recordApril 28, 2010
You make the case for this great poster that shows the cracks in Wall Street. And back in 1996, the Federal Reserve reinterpreted the Glass-Steagall Act several times at the behest of Wall Street, eventually allowing bank holding companies to earn up to 25 percent of their revenues in investment banking. But you know what? That wasn't enough for them. They then came back in 1999 and repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that worked for over 60 years in this country, brought about, as you pointed out, because of the Great Depression that created those firewalls between investment banking, commercial banks, and insurance companies. And then in 2000, what was the next thing that happened? The next thing that happened in 2000 when Brooksley Born, who was then the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman, said, We should regulate derivatives, and our friends in the White House and around basically said, Oh, no. We can't. We passed a law that basically prevented Congress from regulating derivatives. Those derivatives are the things we're talking about today, these credit default swaps that brought AIG down; these collateralized debt obligations, synthetic or otherwise, that brought the entire financial services industry down. And as you can see, the other cracks, the regulation that was created in 2004 that took away the leverage cap of 12 to 1, and as a result, where were they leveraged at but at 30 to 1, the Lehman Brothers, the Goldman Sachs of the world.
