What happened next? An almost exact replay of the Roaring Twenties. Once again, banks originated fraudulent loans and sold them to their customers in the form of securities. Once again, there was a huge conflict of interest that finally resulted in a banking crisis.
This time the banks were bailed out, but millions of Americans lost their savings, their jobs, even their homes.
A personal note. I worked for Bill Clinton as Secretary of Labor and I believe most of his economic policies were sound. But during those years I was in fairly continuous battle with some other of his advisers who seemed determined to do Wall Street’s bidding.
On Glass-Steagall, they clearly won.
To this day some Wall Street apologists argue Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have prevented the 2008 crisis because the real culprits were nonbanks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
Baloney. These nonbanks got their funding from the big banks in the form of lines of credit, mortgages, and repurchase agreements. If the big banks hadn’t provided them the money, the nonbanks wouldn’t have got into trouble.
And why were the banks able to give them easy credit on bad collateral? Because Glass-Steagall was gone.
Other apologists for the Street blame the crisis on unscrupulous mortgage brokers.
Actually, Trump isn’t focused on American workers; he’s focused on undocumented “rapists,” who he says the Mexican government is somehow “sending” here as an act of aggression against the United States. And most of the other second-tier candidates have good things to say about Trump, which one can only assume means that they genuinely agree with him.
But this week one of the candidates did decide to take a courageous step of wooing some of those non-bigoted Iowans by taking on Trump directly. It was former Texas Governor Rick Perry who threw caution to the wind, saying:
“I have a message for my fellow Republicans and the independents who will be voting in the primary process: what Mr. Trump is offering is not conservatism, it is Trump-ism – a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense.”
Now it must be noted that he was actually punching back after being slammed earlier by one of Trump’s roundhouse punches:
“When he was governor of Texas he could have done a lot better in terms of securing the border. The job he did in terms of border security was absolutely terrible.”
“It doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a Facebook thing. It’s just about fifty or sixty of us who were on the square together. We were considering forming a center-left party but now we are thinking we should look around at one of the parties establishing themselves and join them as a bloc.”
Now everyone on Dr. Hussein’s balcony began to talk at once.