Destroying Glass-Steagall restrictions
One of Greenspan’s first acts as Chairman of the Fed was to call for repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, something which his old friends at J.P.Morgan and Citibank had ardently campaigned for.
5
Glass-Steagall, officially the Banking Act of 1933, introduced the separation of commercial banking from Wall Street investment banking and insurance. Glass-Steagall originally was intended to curb three major problems that led to the severity of the 1930’s wave of bank failures and depression:
Banks were investing their own assets in securities with consequent risk to commercial and savings depositors in event of a stock crash. Unsound loans were made by the banks in order to artificially prop up the price of select securities or the financial position of companies in which a bank had invested its own assets. A bank's financial interest in the ownership, pricing, or distribution of securities inevitably tempted bank officials to press their banking customers into investing in securities which the bank itself was under pressure to sell. It was a colossal conflict of interest and invitation to fraud and abuse.
Banks that offered investment banking services and mutual funds were subject to conflicts of interest and other abuses, thereby resulting in harm to their customers, including borrowers, depositors, and correspondent banks. Similarly, today, with no more Glass-Steagall restraints, banks offering securitized mortgage obligations and similar products via wholly owned Special Purpose Vehicles they create to get the risk “off the bank books,” are complicit in what likely will go down in history as the greatest financial swindle of all times—the sub-prime securitization fraud.
In his history of the Great Crash, economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted, “Congress was concerned that commercial banks in general and member banks of the Federal Reserve System in particular had both aggravated and been damaged by stock market decline partly because of their direct and indirect involvement in the trading and ownership of speculative securities.
“The legislative history of the Glass-Steagall Act,” Galbraith continued, “shows that Congress also had in mind and repeatedly focused on the more subtle hazards that arise when a commercial bank goes beyond the business of acting as fiduciary or managing agent and enters the investment banking business either directly or by establishing an affiliate to hold and sell particular investments.” Galbraith noted that “During 1929 one investment house, Goldman, Sachs & Company, organized and sold nearly a billion dollars' worth of securities in three interconnected investment trusts--Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; Shenandoah Corporation; and Blue Ridge Corporation. All eventually depreciated virtually to nothing.”
…strategies unimaginable a decade ago…’
The
New York Times described the new financial world created by repeal of Glass-Steagall in a June 2007 profile of Goldman Sachs, just weeks prior to the eruption of the sub-prime crisis: “While Wall Street still mints money advising companies on mergers and taking them public, real money - staggering money - is made trading and investing capital through a global array of mind-bending products and strategies unimaginable a decade ago.” They were referring to the securitization revolution.
The
Times quoted Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein on the new financial securitization, hedge fund and derivatives world: “We've come full circle, because this is exactly what the Rothschilds or J. P. Morgan, the banker were doing in their heyday. What caused an aberration was the Glass-Steagall Act.”
9
Blankfein as most of Wall Street bankers and financial insiders saw the New Deal as an aberration, openly calling for return to the days J. P. Morgan and other tycoons of the ‘Gilded Age’ of abuses in the 1920’s. Glass-Steagall, Blankfein’s "aberration" was finally eliminated because of Bill Clinton. Goldman Sachs was a prime contributor to the Clinton campaign and even sent Clinton its chairman Robert Rubin in 1993, first as “economic czar” then in 1995 as Treasury Secretary. Today, another former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson is again US Treasury Secretary under Republican Bush. Money power knows no party.
Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, testified before US Congressman Barney Frank's Committee on Banking and Financial Services in October 2007, evoking the specter of the Great Depression:
“Since repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, after more than a decade of de facto inroads, super-banks have been able to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s - lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way. And, much of this paper is even more opaque to bank examiners than its counterparts were in the 1920s. Much of it isn't paper at all, and the whole process is supercharged by computers and automated formulas.” 10
Greenspan held Fed rates to those historic lows, lows not seen for that length of time since the Great Depression, until June 30, 2004, when he began the first of what were to be fourteen successive rate increases before he left office in 2006. He took Fed funds rates from the low of 1% up to 4.5% in nineteen months. In the process, he killed the bubble that was laying the real estate golden egg.
In speech after speech the Fed chairman made clear that his ultra-easy money regime after January 2001 had as prime focus the encouragement of investing in home mortgage debt. The sub-prime phenomenon—something only possible in the era of asset securitization and Glass-Steagall repeal, combined with unregulated OTC derivatives trades—was the predictable result of deliberate Greenspan policy. The close scrutiny of the historical record makes that abundantly clear.
Notes
1 Woodward, Bob,
Maestro: Alan Greenspan's Fed and the American Economic Boom, Nov 2000. Woodward’s book is an example of the charmed treatment Greenspan was accorded by the major media. Woodward’s boss at the Washington Post, Catharine Meyer Graham, daughter of the legendary Wall Street investment banker Andre Meyer, was an intimate Greenspan friend. The book can be seen as a calculated part of the Greenspan myth-creation by the influential circles of the financial establishm
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7876
IT AIN'T OVER BY A LONG SHOT. I heard George Soros say today that dollar hegemony was dead. If that's the case we will see global war, because the military machine is all that's left. D
d-l