Sheldon Richman Revisits The Housing-Financial Meltdown
Five years after the housing and financial meltdown, self-styled progressives are still peddling their pseudoexplanation: that it was largely the fault of the 1999 repeal of a provision of the New Deal–era Glass-Steagall Act, which mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking. This tale is favored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others of her ilk, who hold the rather absurd view that the United States had free banking between the 1980s and the passage of Dodd-Frank in 2010. Sheldon Richman wonders if Warren et al. ever bother to look at the facts, particularly the passage of Glass-Steagall and what, if any, role the repeal actually played in the crisis