Bank regulation
Glass-Steagall

Some text from Glass-Steagall

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Glass-Steagall: “…Most of what people consider financial assets, are totally worthless. They're derivatives. They're gambling—they're side-bets on gambling for side-bets. They do not represent real, physical-economic assets. They're frauds. We're talking about hundreds, or maybe quadrillions of nominal dollars out there, as the world's financial assets in debt—which ain't worth nuthin'! And it's gambling. It's as if you took the game of Monopoly, and you brought the game of Monopoly into Wall Street, and now you play with Monopoly money. And you declare you have a great victory. And then somebody comes, and asks you to pay the bill for whatever they're serving that night, and they don't have any real money, they have only Monopoly money. What happens? The game is over. And that's what we're dealing with. You're dealing with a system which is based on Monopoly money. All these financial derivatives, this vast amount of money, all this bailout is all fake and fraudulent! “…So, what do we do, using Glass-Steagall approach? We take the entire system, reestablish Glass-Steagall, and under Glass-Steagall, we cancel all the Monopoly money. And we defend the integrity of legitimate obligations, of the type we have in regular banks. “…(S)ince 2007, especially since 2008, we have destroyed the integrity of the banking system… So, we didn't do what we should have done. This rolled over, with the beginning of a series of swindles, into what happened 2008. That was under Bush. Then we went, in order to cover the crimes we had committed, we went to bailout! And now, we have a hungry and desperate U.S. population, by and large. They're on the verge of mass starvation, literally, a total breakdown. And the question is: Who do we support? Do we support the people of the United States? Do we support essential industries? Do we support municipalities and their functioning? Do we support the nation itself? Or, do we support foreigners, the bailout monsters, typified by the British Empire? We make that choice: We say, 'Well, we don't owe you guys a thing. We have a Constitution, and what's been happening to us, is a violation of our Constitution.' …If we do as Franklin Roosevelt did, when Roosevelt saved the United States from a correspondingly similar catastrophe, in 1933, by Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall is not some wild innovation; it's simply the principle of the U.S. Federal Constitution. But it needed a specific law, addressed to a specific situation, to defend our nation against this threat. And that's Glass-Steagall…. Excerpted from the May 8, 2010 Webcast Speech by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.