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Lehman Bank crisis and the Glass-Steagall Act
September 15th, 2008 | 
Author: The Lehman Bank, one of the biggest investment banks in America, files for bankruptcy today. That is a very symbolic development with huge implications. Today the biggest ensurance company of the States, AIG, lost over 60% of its value on the stock markets. I picked up an interesting comment from the BBC website’s have your say department:
The banking industry fought for 65 years to have the Glass-Steagall Act repealed (kept stock market and banking industries separate)…they won a few years ago, and major US banks immediately started buying buying brokerage houses and selling questionnable mortgages and securities at astounding profit levels. Banks did this in the 1920s and caused the Great Depression. Senate vote was 90-8…Biden voted for repeal, McCain didn’t bother to show up for the vote.
This is priceless. The ‘big Democrat’ Biden votes in favor of the corporate greed of Banks, and McCain didn’t even bother to show up for the vote. What a mess! This has ‘Great depression’ written all over it and, unfortunately, like in the 20′s it seems to be deliberately *caused* – anyone could have known that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act would have this sort of result. That Act came into place to prevent something like a new great Depression! A quote from Wikipedia:
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bankers and brokers were sometimes indistinguishable. Then, in the Great Depression after 1929, Congress examined the mixing of the commercial and investment banking industries that occurred in the 1920s. Hearings revealed conflicts of interest and fraud in some banking institutions securities activities. A formidable barrier to the mixing of these activities was then set up by the Glass Steagall Act.
So, let’s see: we have the Democrat Vice-president voting in favour of abolishing this act, and this vote took place in 1999 so it wasn’t taken in a time of great economic prosperity but rather in the perspective of decline. This just shows what huge powers American bankers have over politics, Democrats or Republicans alike. And thanks to them, there’s this crisis now. Please, do not vote for these morons.
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The actual quote Martijn is refering to, runs:
‘Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and
industrial policy will shape the pace and
content of transformation as much as the
requirements of current missions.’ (p. 63)
The entire report is about the situation, where something like another Pearl Harbor does NOT happen, or even about the way to avoid another Pearl Harbor:
‘Absent a rigorous program of
experimentation to investigate the nature of
the revolution in military affairs as it applies
to war at sea, the Navy might face a future
Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the
post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war
at the dawn of the carrier age.’ (p. 79).
Other than that, what you are actually saying is, that Hitler wilfully modeled his Russian defeat after Napoleon’s.
This is not ‘crafting a defeat’ its more like keeping afloat an already sinking ship. They clearly knew in 1999 that there were huge economic problems at stake, and they voted in favor of the abolishment of bank protections fully aware of that. That can mean only two things:
1. It’s an attempt to rob as much money in as quick a time as possible, with catastrophic result ahead for the rest of us
2. It’s an attempt to keep these banks afloat who would otherwise have demised earlier.
Whether its option 1) or option 2) clear is that the abolishment of bank protections in the eye of catastrophic economic developments is highly suspicious.