The safe guard of the Glass-Steagall Act was in place since 1933 to prevent banks fron acting like wall street casinos and those casinos from acting like banks.
The Gramm(R-TX),Leach(R-IA), Bliley(R-VA) act of 1999 tore down the firewall that protected our economy for seventy years from becoming the world's largest casino.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=s1999-105&sort=vote
Just a year after the passage of the bill repealing Glass-Steagall, Citigroup had become the number one subprime lender in the country. Its vehicle for this was the newly formed CitiFinancial.
Now the very republican party that holds that same ideology that brought you the demise of our financial system wants you to elect them, again. The free market, free trade ideology is prevalent throughout that party. Free trade is causing the American worker to compete against third world economies and employees. Now when the Democrats wanted to level the playing field this year by increasing taxes on corporation that leave the US and give a generous tax break to responsible corporations that come back and put your family back to work, every single republican voted an adamant no. Who's side are they on? It is obvious not you or your neighbor's side, but big business that continues to flood their campaigns with lucrative money.
Vote Democrat, the job you save may be your own!
The final bill was passed in an overwhelmingly BIPARTISAN manner in the Senate (90-8) and the House: (362-57) and then signed by President Bill Clinton.
<
p>Democratic Senators who voted for repealing Glass-Steagall Act…
<
p>
<
p>Don’t try to pin this on Republicans only. I agree that it was a mistake and I’m very surprised Obama and his Democratically controlled House and Senate have not re-instituted the Glass-Steagall Act.
<
p>And don’t forget, another bill which had broad based blame for our financial meltdown is the Community Reinvestment Act which forced banks to give loans to people who should not have gotten loans.
which has been repeatedly debunked, I actually agree with what John says. Even though Republicans may have initiated it, Glass-Steagall’s repeal was a bipartisan clusterf$&k.
<
p>Glass-Steagall was not, and will not be, re-instituted because there were a great many problems with it. It ought to have been scrapped. This is not, however an endorsement of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act as the best instrument to replace it. The motivation behind it, ‘modernization’ of the banking and credit industry was needed and well justified at the time. Sadly, banking is boring and a great many Senatrolls and Congrescritters merely phoned in their vote.
<
p>It’s difficult to say if the Glass-Steagall act would have averted this crisis or would have simply prevented it from becoming so all enveloping: it may have been the difference between a high tide and a tsunami. What surely would have prevented the crisis altogether was solid regulation: AIG was regulated in name only and many mortgage brokers, we are now learning, committed outright fraud. Furthermore, in 2005 the 5 largest investment banks, only one of which has survived the crisis, asked the SEC for and received permission to increase their debt to equity ratio beyond the then standard 12:1. If the SEC had said no Lehman Bros and Bear Stearns might still be alive today…
<
p>