This law should never have been repealed.
The GS act covered a lot of issues. They need to be debated individually. One thing we can all agree on is that our big banks are too big and still to big to fail. We also now have the fed gov and taxpayer doing too much of the housing market.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are responsible for the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Community Reinvestment Act was directly responsible for the Housing Bubble and Sub Prime Mortgage Implosion that took down our economy in the last decade.
The Clintons, especially Hillary (CRA was her baby), and the Democrats wanted to vastly expand the CRA and were pressuring banks with Occupy Wall Street and #BLM style protests and threats of Federal law suits if they did no lend money to people who did not qualify for loans and could not pay them back.\
When pressed, the bankers told the Clintons that they had a legal fiduciary duty to make sure money only was lent to qualified borrowers with proper down payments and were legally prohibited from loaning their banks widows and orphans savings money to dead beats.
They also blamed Glass-Steagall for not allowing them access to other types of investment funds other bank deposits.
So they cut a deal with the Clintons
The Clintons and the Democrats would repeal Glass-Steagall which would allow banks to solicit funds to form investment pools to make CRA loans to probable deadbeats..
In return for the repeal of Glass-Steagall would package the loan portfolio into synthetic securities called derivatives with various tranches representing differing degrees of risk and return.
This allowed the banks to package high risk home finance to deadbeats as AAA securities
This drove the Housing Bubble to astronomical levels and when the bubble crashed along with the sky high inflated home values it put a hurt on the economy that we have yet to recover from - thanks to the irresponsible actions by Barak Obama’s Administration and Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Not sure if Glass-Steagall is a good idea at this point but it is good politics because , after 8 years of Obama, we are facing the potential for the Mother Of All Financial Corrections so redoing Glass-Steagall puts Trump and his political movement out in front of the looming crisis
“This law should never have been repealed.”
I agree and was appalled at the time it was. Since then, branch banks have turned into piranha aquariums where short-skirted bankeretts wheedle the Ma and Pa Kettle rubes into buying over-priced and under-performing proprietary mutual funds. I’ve seen ‘em in action in their goldfish bowl cubicles, and have met some of these bankeretts socially, who barely know the difference between a dime and a nickle, but DO know how to wear a cute skirt.
I agree.
Remember after the 2009 meltdown we heard politicians promising to fix the problem with banks that were "too big to fail"?
Well - they never fixed it and in fact, they allowed (helped?) their sugar-daddy financial institutions and supporters get even bigger.
Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagall essentially allowed banks to gamble away people's savings and deposits by investing in high-risk securities, and was one of the principal causes underlying the 2008 financial collapse. Moreover, allowing banks to invest savings in high risk securities makes it more or less necessary for the government to guarantee the loans, meaning that taxpayers are inevitably made responsible for bailing out the banks' losses (hence TARP and "too big to fail").
Glass-Steagall was a sensible restriction. If banks want out of Glass-Steagall, then they should also be disqualified from FDIC or bailouts such as we saw under Hank Paulson and his ObaMaoite allies.