the real problem is a bit back.

The long and the short of it is that banks' casino moves busted the house and the result was the Great Depression. Glass Steagall, in a nutshell, says "you can be a player or you can be the house, you can't be both" - you are either a "thrift", (place people put their money for safe keeping) or an "investment bank", (place people put their money to make it grow.) Dodd-Frank, on the other hand, recognized that thrifts starve to death under perpetually low interest rates. But rather than, you know, raise interest rates to the point where companies couldn't buy each other out for two six packs and a promise, Dodd-Frank allowed thrifts to be investment banks.

The upside of this is that banks made a fuckton of money. The downside of this is that banks made a fuckton of money by doing risky shit, the more risky shit they did the more money they made, the more money they made the higher their stock price went up, the higher their stock price went up the easier they could finance buying each other out, the more they financed buying each other out the more the bond market grew, the more the bond market grew the riskier everything got, the riskier everything got the more likely the banks were to bust again.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

- Paul Wellstone

Wellstone, of course, was dead within three years. I'm sure it was nothing.