From: "Lynn Wigglesworth" <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com>
To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] Will we ever learn from history?
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 11:06:25 -0500
A good NYT editorial, comparing Obama's "best and brightest" team to JFK's
team. And history repeating itself in other ways. This paragraph struck me:
"Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling
that went on in Wall Street's big casinos, all of which cratered while at
least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking
monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct
of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton's Treasury
Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped
repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because
Citigroup's ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad
loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s. "