Friday, December 18, 2009

Too Big To Fail

Kudos to Senators McCain and Mark Cantwell who have introduced legislation to breakup large financial organizations. I am quite tired of Too Big to Fail. If that is true, they are simply too big.
McCain would restore the Glass-Steagall law prohibiting banks being in the brokerage business. This was a lesson we learned in the Great Depression and then forgot it under the slogan of one-stop shopping. It is time to restore it before the next financial crisis hits us again.

2 comments:

The Arthurian said...

Amen. But I don't have much faith in human memory. We may restore Glass-Steagall now, but when we need to boost growth 40 years from now we'll abandon it again as a foolish notion.

This failure of memory may have been what Keynes had in mind in 1926 when he wrote: "As things are now, we have nothing to look forward to except a continuance of Conservative governments, not merely until they have made mistakes in the tolerable degree which would have caused a swing of the pendulum in former days, but until their mistakes have mounted up to the height of disaster."

Allan Schmid said...

To Arthurian,
I agree with you. Did you notice that recently Senators John McCain and Maria Cantwell introduced legislation that would prohibit commercial banks from undertaking brokerage activities. New York Times, Dec. 16, 2009.
Allan