Financial Reform

If the recent fuss over financial reform taught the public anything, it's that it is really hard to redo something once it has been undone.

If Congress had not been so gung-ho to get rid of Glass-Stegall 11 years ago, we would not be tumbling towards a depression. But like everyone else, they must have believed that the stock market would continue to go up. There are legitimate gripes that the recently passed financial reform law doesn't put an end to "too big to fail" and provides loopholes to some of the megabanks that got us into this mess. Some of the very people who got G-S repealed are still in Washington--as lobbyists--so reinforcing the Depression-era rules would have been a big hurdle to overcome.