It's time to stop propping up the banks, and end "too big to fail."One way to do that is to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act. Under Glass-Steagall, we had two kinds of banks. One, like your neighborhood bank, did checkbooks, home loans, and savings accounts. Their technical name was "commercial banks."
The second kind of bank was what were called "Investment Banks," places like Merrill Lynch used to be, where you bought and sold stocks, bonds, and commodities. Betting banks.
Glass-Steagall said that these two types of banks had to be different and separate, couldn't even be owned by the same people, and couldn't get into each others' business. So you always knew that your bank wasn't gambling in the back room with the money in your checking or savings account, and wasn't out hustling your mortgage to some foreign investment fund.
But Republican Senator Phil Gramm and his banker buddies didn't like that at all. So in the final year of the Clinton Administration, they put an end to the Glass-Steagall act that had been protecting us ever since the Great Depression.
The result, just like in 1929, was predictable. The banks gambled, lost, and crashed. And took us all down with them.
It's time to put back into place that firewall between commercial and investment banks, and end banks that are too big to fail. And to stop big bank crony CEOs like Jamie Dimon from padding their wallets at our expense. Let's make banking back into the boring and safe industry that it was before Phil Gramm and his Republican buddies came along.
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