Schmidt Wrote:Chet Ruminski Wrote:President Ronald Reagan may have cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 30 percent, starting the wealth accumulation at the top, but it was President Bill Clinton who deregulated the banks with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) that forced the middle class deeper and deeper into debt and eventually created the great recession.
Phil Uhrich
MINNPOST
minnpost.com
Your link didn't provide me with Phil Uhrich's article of interest so I dug it out and noticed that he linked to two articles to make his case, one in the Huffington Post, How Congress Rushed a Bill that Helped Bring the Economy to Its Knees, and the other in the Washington Post, Washington’s Invisible Hand. So for the sake of completeness, I have shown the links in Ulrich's article that he cited, and extracted a few paragraphs (Chet style cherry picking).
With regards to the HP article, Paul Blumenthal heaps the blame on Congress. "In the end, the country would have been better served had Congress not taken the 262-page Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had trouble passing Congress on its own accord, and inserted it into a bloated 11,000 page conference report when no one was looking. If ever there was a case where Congress should have given more time and listened closer, this was it. Now, we’re all paying for it."
From the Washington Post article, "in 1999 Bill Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a bank deregulation bill that swept away a Depression-era law known as Glass-Steagall. The new law had such a chorus of bipartisan support that it passed the Senate 90-8".
"The current financial crisis is frequently called the worst since the Great Depression. And Gramm-Leach-Bliley is often cited as a cause, even by some of its onetime supporters. Yet the criticism is often vague, which means that anyone trying to understand the causal chain — how the end of Glass-Steagall led to the end of Lehman Brothers — will have a hard time doing so. To many banking experts, the reason is simple enough: namely, that the law didn’t really do much to create the current crisis. It is a handy scapegoat, since it’s easily the biggest piece of financial deregulation in recent decades. But one act of deregulation, even a big one, and the absence of other, good regulations aren’t the same thing. The nursemaid of the current crisis isn’t so much what Washington did, in other words, as what it didn’t do."
"...But surely the bulk of the blame lies with the policy makers and regulators who were on duty while the housing bubble inflated and Wall Street went wild — the Bush administration and Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. Their near-religious belief in the powers of the market led them to conclude that the mere fact that a company was willing to make an investment made that investment O.K."
Just adding a little context to Chet's pervasive "Bill Clinton blame game".
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Schmidt, Did you once say that some frugal living is necessary to provide for retirement?