The Scale of Wall Street’s Holdings Are ''Unprecedented in U.S. History'': Senate Report

[RiverLover]

27. Well, Bill Clinton did deregulate the banks, allowing them to become "too big to fail"

as well as allowing them to play ponzi schemes with derivatives & crash the economy, when he repealed Glass Steagall. He wanted to cut Social Security too, but thank god that was squashed.

These are the sad facts~

After taking office, Clinton shelved most of his populist promises. He made Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs co-chairman, his economic czar and embraced deficit reduction as the key to wooing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to lower interest rates and fuel growth.

After Republicans took Congress in 1994, Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” He championed deregulation, particularly in telecommunications and finance, which culminated in the repeal of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act boundaries on banks and the torpedoing of efforts to regulate derivatives.

Clinton did reverse some of President Ronald Reagan’s top-end tax breaks, but he also lowered capital-gains taxes, and his reforms encouraged the explosion of stock options for high-level executives. He embraced House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s welfare repeal and even flirted with carving private accounts out of Social Security.

Clinton’s trade policy was defined by and for multinational corporations and banks. His major trade accords protected the rights of investors but not workers.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/06/03/democrats-must-overcome-clinton-nostalgia/