Jul
25
One Thing Both Parties Want: Break Up the Banks Again
By
Former President Bill Clinton in 1999 signed the law that undid much of the Glass-Steagall Act, freeing banks to form all-in-one financial services shops. CreditJustin Lane
Could the Glass-Steagall Act — the Depression-era legislation that forced the separation of investment banking from commercial banking, among other things — be coming back?
In an extremely odd political dovetail, both the Democratic and the Republican platforms include planks that call for the restoration of the landmark 1933 law. Glass-Steagall aimed to protect the common folk who deposited money in their banks for safekeeping, and ordered that those banks decouple themselves from the business of placing the type of speculative stock market bets that caused the great crash of 1929…
