The 19th Century writer Ambrose Bierce once wrote, “The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.” That was a perfectly apt observation and that same type of climate remains today. To put it another way, consider how Jim Leach was one of the pioneers for banning Internet gambling, yet he also opened the door for Wall Street’s rampant casino-style wagering to be insured by the taxpayers. Yes, Leach was one of the sponsors of Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which created the “too big to fail” banks. In other words, anti-gambling “moralists” created the framework for Wall Street’s “moral hazard,” i.e. when banks take on excessive risk because they know they have a safety blanket.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley…show more content… In addition, it opened the door for widespread consolidation, thereby creating “too big to fail” banks. In contrast, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 spread the systemic risk of the financial sector across several companies. Glass-Steagall wasn’t a miracle cure for preventing future bank failures, but no bank’s demise threatened to wreck the entire global economy. In contrast, the financial system melted down in less than a decade after Gramm-Leach-Bliley of 1999 was…show more content… Those three are staunch neoliberals, meaning they advocate pure free market capitalism with hardly any restrictions upon the banking industry. Although, Clinton would have been far better off by heeding the advice of former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND). Dorgan prognosticated in 1999 on the floor of the Senate, “I’ll bet one day someone is going to look back on this and say, ‘How on earth could we have thought it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate through merger and acquisition to become bigger and bigger and bigger with far more firms in the category of too big to