Harlem Dudes Dig Glass Steagall

Harlem and Bronx NY dudes dig Glass Steagall Act of 1933 and its revival by Sen. Elizabeth Warren.  It really is Glass Steagalll or die. 

Moving the leverage ratio won't change anything, says Dr. Gerrald Epstein — only Glass Steagall will change the fact that today's banks do nothing for the real economy.

Epstein, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and a member of the anti-free-market Center for Popular Economics, both at Amherst College in Massachusetts, was interviewed on the Real News Network by Sharmini Peries from Baltimore, on the recent decision by U.S. regulators to raise the reserve requirement for banks from 3% to 5%. Epstein said this is meaningless, since banks didn't even keep to the 3% leverage ratio, using off-balance-sheet assets, "risk-weighted asset valuations" (which allows so-called low-risk assets to be valued at less than face value, but, of course, "using false models that would show that the assets were really safer than they were"), and exotic derivatives, to make it appear that "they had almost no capital to speak of in the lead-up to the crisis."

Asked what he recommended, he said to end the use of risk-weighted assets and off-balance-sheet assets, lift the reserve ratio to 10% (Brown Vitter), and implement Glass-Stegall:

"Elizabeth Warren and others have proposed a reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act,"he said."That is, a separation of the very risky speculative kind of banking from more boring banking that is actually serving the needs of the real economy. So implementing something like that would also help, because, after all, we're not just looking at the risk that the taxpayers are going to have to bail out the banks, as important as that is. We're also talking about what it is the banks are actually doing to help the economy."

Epstein adds:"We really can't rely anymore on these big Wall Street banks, if we ever did rely on them, because they simply don't have an interest in supporting the people in the real economy."

Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren responded to an intervention by LaRouche PAC organizers in Boston by pledging to go all out for Glass-Steagall after the current Congressional break.

Break Up the Banks or Else

Break up the banks is still the demand from Sen. Eliz. Warren, and also of course from Larouchepac

ore Prominent Glass-Steagall Coverage of Sen. Warren

November 29, 2013 • 8:00PM

Another prominent American columnist, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, has weighed in supporting Elizabeth Warren and the promotion of Glass Steagall. In a Nov. 12 column that appeared in both Newsweek and The Daily Beast, longtime Washington fixture Clift reported on the Roosevelt Institute event where Warren assailed the too-big-to-fail banks and promoted her 21st Century Glass Steagall legislation. Clift noted that Warren's name has repeatedly surfaced in recent weeks as a possible candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and that, while her staff insist that she has no plans to run, it is giving her a further political spotlight from which to promote banking reform including Glass Steagall.
"A professor turned politician, she was among the first to sound the alarm bell on a runaway banking industry, and now she's using her seat on the Senate Banking Committee to warn of another 'too big to fail' crisis in the making." Clift went on to note that Warren "wants to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, a Depression-era piece of legislation pushed through by FDR that separated depository banking and investment banking." Clift noted that, while most sponsors of the bill are liberal Democrats, with the exception of John McCain, "the legislation does have Tea Party appeal. A companion bill in the House is titled 'Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2013." After paying lip service to Warren's support for Dodd-Frank, Clift noted that "she is the go-to person on banking regulations and the senator most feared by the banking industry."
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