Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Half a decade has now passed since the great Wall Street collapse of 2008. Millions of words have attempted to capture the epic greed, arrogance and corruption that brought on the greatest financial implosion since the Great Depression. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission issued 662 pages on the subject. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have held an endless stream of hearings. Dozens of books by authors who had a front row seat to the chaos line our bookshelves and libraries.
And yet, despite all this, the President of the United States can’t seem to remember who caused the collapse of our financial system; who caused the collapse of the housing market and millions of foreclosures and the resulting joblessness that still grips the country.
President Obama can’t seem to recall that it was the financial de-regulators of the Clinton administration who bullied and ridiculed their opponents and strong-armed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. It was that repeal that paved the way for financial Armageddon in America. The outcome has left 46.2 million Americans living in poverty and the greatest wealth disparity in a century.
Surely if the President understood how this great collapse occurred he wouldn’t seriously be considering putting Lawrence (Larry) Summers into the post of Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Would he?
Summers, one of the core members of the de-regulation swat team, was at the November 12, 1999 signing ceremony for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the de-regulatory legislation that repealed the depression era Glass-Steagall Act and allowed commercial banks holding insured deposits to merge with investment banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies to become vast gambling casinos and too-big-to-fail taxpayer albatrosses. Summers became U.S. Treasury Secretary after his former boss, Robert Rubin, left the post and headed directly to Citigroup’s Board – a post that would pay him $120 million over an 8-year span for a non-management job. (Citigroup was one of the key firms heavily lobbying for the deregulation.)
Summers said this at the signing ceremony:
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