One of the tropes of the Obama regime’s defenders is that the financial debacle was due to that villain of irresponsible free market types — deregulation. They point to the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act amending the Glass-Steagall Act and say, “See, that’s the problem!”
Cato Institute’s Mark Calabria destroys that idea in this post.
I’ll add that even if Glass-Steagall had been left completely alone, nothing in it would have prevented the tidal wave of bad mortgages that ultimately ruined so many institutions. And the one regulatory institution that attempted to warn about the trouble that was brewing, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, was bullied by Barney Frank into silence.
