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The above link will take you to an article published in the New York Times in November of 1999. It will probably ring a bell when I tell you it is when Congress and then President Clinton signed the bill that repealed the Glass-Steagall bill. Still not coming to you? Well to refresh your memory, the Glass-Steagall bill was originally passed in the thirties and it separated the banks, brokerage houses, real estate companies and insurance companies so that if your entity is doing business in one of those areas, you can't do business in another.
Remember...it allowed Citibank to buy Travelers Insurance and become Citygroup. It allowed Washington Mutual and Countrywide to become banks and AIG to be able to bundle now toxic assets into derivitives and generally to take all regulations off of the financial industry somehow never thinking that human nature (i.e. greed) would never enter into it.
Well, one guy...Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota thought this was a bad idea and this is the quote from that article that stands out:
'"I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. "'I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.'"
Ten years' time? Well that would be now, wouldn't it?
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