I didn't say Glass-Steagall being repealed was responsible for everything that was wrong. But having it in place would have kept our institutions smaller with f

I didn't say Glass-Steagall being repealed was responsible for everything that was wrong. But having it in place would have kept our institutions smaller with fewer entanglements, therefore fewer firms would be in the "too big to fail" category. True, it would have prevented a few of the mergers that are happening now but they may not have been necessary. Once you eliminate the problem of one institution bringing down the entire financial system, the existing bankruptcy courts are a better mechanism for unwinding bad assets. > "Many foreign countries never had any law like Glass-Steagall in place and they don't seem to be suffering the same problems. As logic tells us, the current crisis seems to be orthogonal to the presence or absence of Glass-Steagall." I don't buy into that logic. Just because every financial system in the world hasn't failed due to too much deregulation, doesn't mean deregulation is bad or not the cause of our current crisis. There are a multitude of things contributing to the current problem, but excessive regulation and checks and balances aren't one of them. We don't necessarily need to reinstate Glass-Steagall, but we need a modern-day equivalent. We need to ensure financial institutions can fail without jeopardizing the entire economic system. I'm personally in favor of something along the lines of the DoJ anti-trust mechanism, with an independent body that analyzes financial mergers and assets from the perspective of whether they are dangerous to the economy and citizens. On the other hand, I don't feel that our current DoJ is working very well so maybe that's not the best idea. I'm open to suggestions.