Wall Street watchers have breathlessly greeted the news that the Bernie Sanders’ camp was able to place restoring the Glass-Steagall Act in the final draft of the Democratic Platform and get a unanimous vote on the measure from the Drafting Committee. The Committee includes five individuals selected by Senator Bernie Sanders, six from Hillary Clinton and four selected by DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which came in response to the Wall Street collapse from 1929 to 1932, protected the U.S. financial system for 66 years until the Bill Clinton administration repealed it at the behest of his pals on Wall Street in 1999. It took just nine years after the repeal for the financial system to collapse in the same epic fashion as 1929. The Act makes it illegal for banks holding insured deposits, which are backstopped by the taxpayer, to merge with the gambling casinos of Wall Street – the investment banks and brokerage firms. Restoring the Act would mean that Wall Street institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, would have to shed their commercial banking operations that hold the insured deposits.
The public debate on the threat posed by these financial fireworks factories should have ended after they collapsed the system in 2008 with reckless and callous disregard for the country’s interests. The debate should have ended again in 2012 when JPMorgan Chase was caught using hundreds of…