"Too big to fail" is also an euphemism for "too big to obey the law." > Because this didn't start on November 5th, 1999. This started on April 6th, 1998, a yea

"Too big to fail" is also an euphemism for "too big to obey the law." > Because this didn't start on November 5th, 1999. This started on April 6th, 1998, a year and a half before Gramm-Leach-Bliley passed, and it started with one man telling the federal government that he just plain wasn't going to obey the law, and that man's name was Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill. Sandy Weill's purchase of Citibank, as CEO of the brokerage and insurance company Travelers Group, was euphemistically called a merger, but it was Weill who was calling the shots, and he was open from day one as to what he was doing: intentionally violating Glass-Steagall, the law that prohibited banks from owning brokerages and vice versa. He didn't agree with the law, he wanted it changed, he believed that banks should be able to gamble on more risky assets, and he intended to get even richer doing so. Under the terms of Glass-Steagall, on April 6th, 1998 a two-year countdown clock to the destruction of Citibank automatically began. If he was going to obey the law, he had until then to announce a plan to spin off all of the departments that Glass-Steagall said a bank couldn't own, and then another three years after that to complete the sales, or else surrender his banking license to the FDIC. Instead, he said, in effect, "come and pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Go ahead, kill off the single largest and most important bank in the world for being a scofflaw. I dare you," in terms almost that blunt. > Congress blinked. On almost the last possible day they could do so, they revoked the FDIC's permission to yank his banking license. Why? Because Citibank was too big to fail. And that meant that it was too big to be forced to obey US law. And to the right-wing Democrats in the White House, and the Republicans in Congress, that was just okay with them. Only a few "far-left" "radicals" and "extremists" thought otherwise. Who were the American people supposed to believe, a tiny minority of "far-left" "radical" "extremist" "socialist" nobodies, or "historians," "economists," "financial experts," college professors from "top universities," "successful entrepreneurs," senior spokesmen for both parties, and the President's own Treasury Secretary? > And I'm sure if you ask President Obama about any of this, he'll put on the usual basset-hound expression that he wears when you ask questions about prior misconduct, and give his usual stern speech about "looking forward, not backwards" (when refusing to look backwards is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place). http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/426456.html http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/426456.html