Well, jeez, thank you, Ad! One article said it, and I never even thought to question it. That writer needed you for an editor, too. :-}
I literally had to google his bio to see where I went wrong.

Didn't know Alan worshipped at her other parts! Oh, my. I didn't know until a few years ago Andrea was married to him. Ugh.
Frontline was grisly at watch by this point. A few people see so clearly what needs to happen; but the Chicago Boys rule. Too bad, maybe, Obama is from Chicago.
There were lots of photos on the Frontline with Rand in them. Shiver...

I also read that Volker's high interest rates cause hardship for farmers, and that's why the tractor march on Washington happened, and discussions of "parity for farmers."

Oh, dear. I thought I was doing the right thing unpublishing it. I had said initially that I would, and once my problem was solved, I told a would-be new blogger I would leave it up until his questions were answere satisfactorily. It took me awhile because of Slow Brain Syndrome to Unpublish, rather than delete. I was trying to make room for more blogs, as I thought people said there was only so much room available.
I didn't mean to behave badly. I'll check, but it all should still be there. My apologies.

Thank you Wendy. I really wanted to read the last response from kgb666 because it contained some pertinent information.

And yes. A blog can only be viewed if the owner / author publishes it. Nobody can read or otherwise access the blog of another that is not published to the public area. To republish is not a problem at all. I do wonder though that when you do it if the comments previously posted to the particular blog will reconnect themselves as child records belonging to that parent record blog. I suspect that will in fact be the behavior.

The key to Glass-Steagall is that for some banks the government insures deposits against loss. That's what the FDIC does. It protects the deposits we all place in banks, but unfortunately it also insures the banks when they fail.

The bank takes investor money, reinvests it in other investments, and pays the investor interest out of the profit they make. The bank's profit is skimmed off the top. That's the basic business model of banking and has been for centuries.

Depositors/Investors come in two flavors. Most have comparatively small amounts and simply have to take whatever services the bank offers. They are storing their money for later and do not have the time or expertise needed to evaluate the danger of putting money into a bank. Banks are in big solid buildings. They will be there forever. The other flavor is the big money investor who wants to buy the investment expertise of the bankers. These investors compare banks for the largest and safest return, always recognizing that larger returns are inherently less safe. Those two different classes of investor require different services and need very different banking institutions.

Depositors are just small "investors" who have money they want to store for later, and they don't have the expertise or the total amount of money avail needed to do what the bankers do in investing that money. Similarly, a lot of the investments are like small business loans, car and appliance loans, personal loans, and so on. These are small and not highly profitable transactions, but they make up a great deal of the economy. That's especially true for the middle class. They are also routine transactions that occur in a money economy and require no real banking expertise. But they keep the economy working.

So the government provided FDIC to guarantee the deposits if the bank fails. This lowered the interest banks had to pay for the deposits because the risk premium was removed from the transaction. Glass-Steagall limited the risks banks could take with the government insured deposits so that commercial banks had less risk of failure. Commercial banks had both the protection for depositors and regulation that made the banks themselves less risky. Without the regulation, FDIC was actually insuring the banks against the risk they took to make their profits.

Banks want to use the low-cost insured deposits as a base from which to make very risky and extremely profitable investments. That means keeping the FDIC insurance, but stripping out the bank regulation. That's what Phil Graham's removal of Glass-Steagall did, and it set up the financial collapse and the rape of the taxpayer we have witnessed and suffered from over the last decade.

And yes, making the investment banks like Goldman Sachs into government insured banks to save them as was done last year did exactly what the banks wanted. The banks now have low-cost insured deposits to supply the money they invest in risky and high profit investments. It puts the taxpayers on the hook for bank losses because they are now government insured, while the bankers collect all the profits when their risky investments work.

It works because the banks involved are so large that their failure is very likely to take the entire economy down with them. That's the "Too Big to Fail" business. The government can't renege on the insurance they have guaranteed, no matter how idiotic the bank investments turn out to be. The entire economy is held hostage to the predations of the Wall Street Bankers. This situation is the great banking the bankers are getting record bonuses for conducting.

We need Glass-Steagall back again. It takes that kind of regulation and supervision to keep commercial banks from using low-cost insured deposits for high-risk, high-return gambles.

Investment banks will not do the job done by commercial banks. It's not profitable enough. So the commercial banks are essential to keeping the routine financial transactions that make economy work going. Glass-Steagall is what creates a separate class of commercial banks. That law or something like it is absolutely required to take the banking risk out of the entire economy and limit it to the big money investments where it belongs.