A Short History of Glass-Steagall and the Result of Its Murder

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Death-of-Glass-Steagal-by-Rodger-Knight-110917-726.html

Outside of agriculture, which had been experiencing an economic depression since the end of World War I, the American economy during the 1920s was robust, vibrant and it seemed as though it would grow forever. The country had experienced an unprecedented industrial expansion starting with the Civil War and the demands for manufactured goods (and the technology to produce those goods on a grand scale) the war engendered. That expansion had continued through World War I and into the Roaring Twenties. So great was the faith in the American economy that as late as 1928 Herbert Hoover remarked in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention:

"We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us."
http://us.history.wisc.edu/...

The Twenties roared because people had money to spend, a compulsion to buy and an enthusiastic but intemperate faith in the future. People had money to spend because the industrialist shared this unrestrained but ultimately insane belief that prosperity would not only last forever but that it would expand forever. Profits were, indeed, high and business, in anticipation of even greater rewards, reinvested in new factories creating new jobs and the new jobs created new spending. In the industrialized East, at least, the future could not have looked brighter. Nowhere would this mentality be more clearly displayed than in the stock market; almost nowhere would it eventually prove to be more destructive.

The tumultuous economy of the 1920s would find its antithesis in the dark years of the 1930s and hard lessons would be learned only to be forgotten in the 1990s. Even today there isn't a total consensus on what actually triggered the Great Depression but there is agreement that it resulted from the confluence of a number of events, the stock market crash ranking high on the list. If a single word had to be chosen to define the cause it would be speculation, in industry, in banking, in land, in the stock market. Another word that fits is regulation, more specifically, the lack of it and a third, excess. Discussing the contribution of all of these to the Great Depression and the legislation that followed would be well beyond the scope of this article so I'll limit it primarily to the stock market and to banking.

More at the link --

[annabanana]

1. If people never gambled more than they could afford to lose,

no matter what the "experts" were telling them (with the enthusiastic encouragement of a craven media).. We might have been spared some pain. That said, Glass-Steagall should be reinstated asap.

[banned from Kos]

2. Paul Volcker towers over the new Glass-Steagall (FT)

http://blogs.ft.com/businessblog/2010/01/paul-volcker-towers-over-the-new-glass-steagall/

The Volker Rule applies to far more institutions than the limited G-S.

[Quantess]

3. Looks like a good read.

[mmonk]

4. Thanks for posting this.