You're entitled to your opinions and interpretations. I most certainly did not make you waste your time. You are free to read resource links and articles, or not, and decide for yourself whether you can or will glean any knowledge or insight from them.
Glass-Steagall forced banks, effectually acting as a dam wall, to separate the high pressure, high risk/high return investment activities - business venture start up and expansion loans, derivatives trading, such as credit default swaps, international currency exchange trades, stocks and commodity futures trading, etc. - from their low pressure, low risk/lower profit commercial activity - fee and interest earnings from savings, CDs/money market accounts, checking, credit cards, business and private lending. Investment banks venture the bank corporation's own money and that of their customers, who are fully cognizant, intentional venture capitalists. Commercial banks are essentially retail service providers for businesses' and consumers' deposits. The severe ripple effect of the '08 SiFi's suddenly finding themselves in default when the non-transparent (actual versus stated risk), or fraudulent nature, of their stated valuations versus their actual, insanely leveraged, humongous debt exposure on derivatives became clear, the bust that followed metastasized throughout the entire financial sector - because that financial sector had become an amorphous, overly interdependent blob. Transparency - truthfully stating values and associated risks - is the keystone of legal and worthy investment vehicles. Selling velvet sacks of jumping beans as if they are diamonds, billions of times week, is not.
Under Glass-Steagall, investment banks could no longer do commercial banking, commercial banks did not do investment banking, insurance companies did not do investment banking, or offer their insureds market portfolio services, and they underwrote their in house claims and investment risk exposures through buying re-insurance, government bonds, treasury notes and blue chip stocks - and they ate losses from market dives and big disaster claims mostly on their own dime by raising premiums. Assets and risk activities were separated into spinoff companies or the respective divisions within a SiFi were sold outright. After the repeal of Glass-Steigall, SiFi's re-gathered and departmentalized into all aspects of banking, venture capitalization, life and other insurance and annuities, currency and day trading, credit default swaps, commodity futures trading, etc. etc. - high and low risk all held within house. That exposed their commercial banking depositors' to vastly higher risk than they signed on for. And then the government covered a lot of that defaulted debt through co-absorbing it directly, for an interest payment and levy of eventual fines, within the funds of TARP and other bail out legislation.
You can try and wave off the absence Glass-Steagall as meaningless in face of the crash of '08, but I personally lost about 35,000 dollars out of my retirement investments, a 401K index fund, and a Roth IRA mutual fund, because of it. My mom lost $165,000, all of it from broad market deflation in the hundreds of blue chip companies in her IRA mutual fund. Because the crazy high real estate market spawned the sub-prime mortgage boom, and it all ballooned out of control, with mortgage and equity REIT's became a big thing, and the absolutely massive CDS market bubble escalated with all of it, Banks played a game of pass the hot potato in literally trillions of electronic transactions, floating debt risk on and off their books for micro transaction profits every hour of the day. And once the speculative bubble on all of this interconnected debt derivation burst, that rippled through and broke the world economy...because there wasn't any dam wall between investment banking and commercial banking any more! They gambled on lying about the face value of very badly mixed debt bundles - A level swaps had F and D level risky subprime mortgages mixed in - and swapped them as if they were high value derivatives, by using their famous reputations, cheekily bragging about all the money they made on it, and leveraging it all on paper by citing their commercial depositors' money as if it was their own.
I have been observing how public policy and legislation and campaign finance have played in Wall Street activity for decades, because I've had actual skin in the game since 1990. I still have a slowly but steadily recovering account with RBC Wealth Management. And I have never stopped worrying about it. Because most all of the same players are still in the poker game that folded in '08, only now they're much bigger, and they are hiding more aces up their sleeves.
As to the New York Daily News interviewers, they actually conflated Treasury with the Fed. That's pants-on-head retarded. And the retarded questions confused Sanders, because he thought they just changed the subject of the question at hand in the next sentence. In fact, their questioning showed it was they who were confused, or they even intentionally meant it to trip up Sanders and thereby sway clueless readers. After all, the NYDN is owned by a staunch supporter of Clinton. They are a tabloid, a screaming headline scandal sheet, not a paper of record. They do not have a good financial section, it's a business news section with fluff you would find anywhere on Yahoo or MSN. The New York Times is a paper of record, and it has a superb financial news department, regarded by many as the best in the world. I do in fact give NYT's take on the interview over NYDN's any day.
Dodd-Frank is in fact a main apparatus one uses to break up the big banks. Banks and other SiFi's must be at least big enough (50BN in assets) to come under it's jurisdiction. There is not a stated asset limit, because the determination of high risk is up to the Treasury and the inquiry boards to decide, based on market and economic conditions at the time of assessment. Treasury decided to take MetLife to task, using Dodd-Frank. A judge stopped them for want of more detail in their findings. The case is ongoing. How was that a waste of your time to read about? Is it because you earlier claimed neither I nor the NYT's editorial response nor Sanders himself know what we're talking about by citing Dodd-Frank, Treasury and investigative board inquiries under various laws, as ways to break up big banks and SiFi's? Did the judge tell Treasury to quit using Dodd-Frank against MetLife, and start over? No. She did not. Is she missing your point, too?
