This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save Working People. Elizabeth Warren
were a zillion variations on how the big banks pulled it off, but the bottom line is this: they made a fortune by cheating people. The bank regulators knew about the swindle and could have shut it down, but they did nothing.
When the housing bubble burst and no one could refinance anymore, the whole scheme came crashing down. And just like the busts leading up to the Great Depression, this crash blasted through the economy. During the financial crisis of 2008, more than twenty-six million people couldn’t find a full-time job. More than nine million families lost their homes. Hundreds of thousands of businesses were shuttered. Entrepreneurship plummeted as fewer Americans started new businesses. College students hit graduation with limited or no job prospects, and those who didn’t go to college faced an even bleaker future. Retirement savings took a nosedive. Thousands of suicides were linked to the crisis.
Overall, the 2008 crash cost the U.S. economy an estimated $22 trillion and more human pain than anyone could ever count.
And yet and yet: even after the crash nearly blew our economy back into the Stone Age, Republicans continued to sing the song of deregulation. In 2010, one bank-friendly congressman declared, “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” Yeah, the bank regulators served the banks, all right—and they nearly destroyed the American economy in the process.
FINANCIAL REGULATIONS MATTER
And that’s really my point here: regulations matter. From the 1790s to the 1930s, there weren’t many financial regulations, and the economy swung back and forth from boom to bust every twenty years or so. Banks boomed and banks crashed. The busts were long and hard; with no cop on the beat, uneasy investors held tight to money that might have funded good business ideas on Wall Street. With no antitrust laws, corporations began to grow much bigger, and many ran roughshod over both customers and smaller competitors.
When Franklin Roosevelt said we could do better, he reined in the big banks and giant corporations in ways that had never been done before. Government became a more active participant in keeping markets honest. Together, over time, we built economic stability and growth. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan turned that around. He declared that government was the enemy and began unraveling the regulatory net, and he led the country down a path that ultimately resulted in the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression.
After the Great Depression, regulations helped stop crashes. When the regulations were undone, a bust followed.
The timeline above says it all: basic rules of the road bought us decades of financial stability, and weakening those rules put us back on the path to a giant boom and an even bigger bust.
Sure, there are lots of other pieces to the puzzle, and I’ll talk about some of them later. But it’s time to face facts: we have already paid dearly for the deadly mistakes of Reagan-era economics, and if we ignore the big lesson here, our country will ultimately pay an even higher price. Despite the evidence, a significant portion of the political elite seems determined to stay on the same path. The Republican president, the Republican leadership, and the Republicans in Congress continue to sing the same song: To propel this economy forward, put the regulators on a tight leash and then let giant corporations do whatever they like.
I’ve been in the U.S. Senate for four years, and I’ve listened to these guys until I can deliver most of their speeches in my sleep—after all, most of them are reciting the same mind-numbing nonsense they’ve chanted since Ronald Reagan first smiled and waved his way into the White House. It’s as if the deregulation of the last thirty-five years never happened and the crash of 2008 was just a bad dream that can be whisked away with an elegant silk hankie.
When Donald Trump says he wants to repeal the financial regulations that President Obama put in place, he’s just signing up for the same old deregulation strategy that Republicans have embraced for decades. He even said Dodd-Frank “made it impossible for bankers to function.” Well, it definitely made it harder for bankers to function in the reckless way they used to—that was the whole point! Republicans like Newt Gingrich say Trump’s presidency is one more “great effort to break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model” of government. I wonder if Newt is planning to bail out the banks himself next time around.
I don’t love all regulations—no one does—but some problems can be solved only when our government writes and enforces a set of rules. How else are we going to take on fraud, antitrust issues, and a banking industry that has the power to wreck our economy? Look at it this way: if corporations can cheat people or crush their competitors or load up on risks—and if their top executives can stuff their own pockets by leading their corporations in those directions—then sooner or later, one of them will do it. And once one of them cheats, everyone else is caught in a bind—follow the cheater or get left behind? Not every CEO of a giant bank may have wanted to get into the scam-your-customer mortgage business, but once the competitors were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from it, the practice got really hard to resist.
This big, dynamic, very complicated economy of ours needs some basic regulations in place to make sure markets work, and it’s not hard to come up with some straightforward rules that can make an enormous difference.
For starters, we should put in place a modern version of Glass-Steagall and separate plain-vanilla banking like checking accounts and savings accounts from crazy risk-taking on Wall Street. This doesn’t have to be partisan. My first cosponsor for a twenty-first-century Glass-Steagall bill was the Republicans’ 2008 presidential nominee, Senator John McCain. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on this idea, and, at his insistence, adopting Glass-Steagall was added to the Republican platform. But the Republican leadership in the House and the Senate has refused to move any such legislation, and now President Trump has put in place an economic team that is headed in the opposite direction. No one ever offers to explain exactly why giant banks should be able to benefit from government insurance and gamble on Wall Street at the same time, but the bank lobbyists have managed to block this bill from going forward.
Here’s another idea: the SEC should hire a leader who doesn’t work for Wall Street—and it should get a much bigger budget so that the agency can actually go out and enforce the law. There have been some good SEC commissioners who have shown some real courage, and this shouldn’t be partisan either, but the latest nominee to head up the SEC built his entire career by aggressively protecting Wall Street from government regulators. Anyone who thinks he’s suddenly going to get tough on the same people who fed him so well for so many years doesn’t know the chummy Wall Street fraternity.
Oh, and here’s a good one: when CEOs break the law, they ought to go to jail, just like anyone else. The words chiseled in stone above the Supreme Court are EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. This is not followed by EXCEPT FOR CORPORATE EXECUTIVES.
Let’s also put some steel in the spines of our prosecutors and start enforcing antitrust laws again. Small drugstores and start-up airlines and even innovative new approaches to health insurance should get a chance to try out their ideas. I believe in a government that works for the people—not for the giants in the industry—and that government should