Isn’t it something how a former Wall Street baron named as one of Time
magazine’s “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” suddenly
becomes a paragon of wisdom in the eyes of the media elites as soon as
he advocates something they favor?
That’s essentially what happened to former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill,
who championed repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall banking
restrictions in 1999, oversaw a firm that made bad mortgage bets in the
following decade that almost caused the firm to implode, and now says he changed his mind and wants a restoration of the New Deal legislation separating commercial banking from investment banking and insurance.Weill is being congratulated by politicos and pundits for at last seeing the “error” of his ways. An alternative explanation for his about-face is that he is fashionably blaming “deregulation” for his own gross errors in running Citi. Whatever the reason, Weill’s change of heart doesn’t change the facts: The mortgages Citi made were not at all enabled by Glass-Steagall’s repeal, but by the subsidies and guarantees of government entities such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and — in Citi’s case in particular — the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312578/sandy-weill-s-about-face-glass-steagall-john-berlau
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