PRESS RELEASE
Wall Street Mobilizes To Stop Glass-Steagall
Aug. 10, 2016 (EIRNS)—It seems that Wall Street is leaving no stone unturned to try to mobilize opposition to the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.
Two experienced, experts in bankruptcy and bailouts, now turned academics, published “insiders’ advice” against Glass-Steagall in ValueWalk Aug. 8, in the manner of Al Capone giving expert advice “from the inside” that more policing would not defeat a Chicago crime wave. “Why Glass-Steagall Talk Is Election Posturing” is this over-the-top wisdom from former Treasury chief economist Phillip Swagel (under Hank “Bailout” Paulson from Goldman Sachs), and Clifford Rossi, who saw the subprime meltdown from the inside of senior management roles at (triple-bankrupt) Citi, (bankrupt) Washington Muutual Bank, and (criminal bankrupt) Countrywide Mortgage in senior risk-management roles. Both are now professors at the University of Maryland. They lecture us that
“Glass-Steagall reinstatement talk is symbolic, and other approaches to ensuring a safe financial system are better.”
The arguments are quite familiar, bankers’ boilerplate stop-Glass-Steagall points.
Then the Wall Street Journal piled in with a still more fantastic column Aug. 9 by a former Wells Fargo CEO, Richard Kovacevic, and a former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chair, William Isaac. The column is replete with irrelevancies, passionately stated, and lies—specifically, that the banking system is allegedly safer than ever, since investment banks have been absorbed into the commercial banks.
As to the mobilization for Glass-Steagall, the latest move is that 14 labor, civic, immigration, and political activists’ groups, including the AFL-CIO, are circulating a petition demanding that Congressional leaders allow a vote on the bipartisan 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. Although the petition states that the vote should take place after the election, the fact that people are mobilizing on behalf of Glass-Steagall is a reflection of the rapidly-growing national sentiment against Wall Street and its casino banks.
Urging people to sign the petition, The Nation pointed out that both Democrats and Republicans have made the “surprise move” of including reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act in their official party platforms.
“Momentum is growing to pass a modern Glass-Steagall Act,” The Nation notes. “A huge majority of working people support the idea of reinstating the Act and a bipartisan bill—introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and supported by Sen. John McCain—has already been introduced in the Senate that would put in place a modern version of the Glass-Steagall Act.”
