Flicker Fusion

Five Congressmen who voted against the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 want to bring it back

Five Congressmen who voted against the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 want to bring it back

Glass-Steagall, passed in 1933, prohibited commercial banks from underwriting stocks and bonds (among other regulations, such as establishing the FDIC) – essentially, keeping commercial and investment banks separate. The repeal of the act, proposed by Phil Gramm (R-TX) in the Senate and Jim Leach (R-IA) in the House, passed thanks largely due to Republican majorities in the House and Senate. It allowed already huge banks, like Citigroup, to become even bigger – “too big to fail” as some said during last year’s financial meltdown. It also allowed banks and bankers to get fabulously wealthy on exotic notions like sub-prime loans instead of making actual investments in real things.

The reinstatement of Glass-Steagall faces a fairly uphill battle as not even President Obama supports it.

These kinds of big-picture regulations strike me as a good thing and, knowing as little as I do about macroeconomics, are the kinds of regulations I’d like to see put in place. I’m curious what the arguments against reinstating Glass-Steagall are.

no title

I don’t do Facebook. I’ve never ousted anyone as the mayor of some hipster bar. Flickr, sure, but I’m a crummy photographer and don’t really connect there. Twitter, for all intents and purposes, is my social network. When I tell people I don’t bother with the other ones, they don’t seem to get it – why is Facebook more frivolous than 140 character “tweets”, they ask. Plus, everyone’s over there in Zuckerland, come on, it’s basically the same thing.

Except that it’s not. Facebook is where people go to dump their lives, waste time and play vampire scrabble while they should be working. There’s no artform, it’s just a heap of digital detritus, which is fine, people need that. Twitter, though, when you’re doing it right, requires craft. Favrd helped us find that.

So, like the rest of you, I was sad to see Dean had shut it down. I share some of your confusion and anger and frustrated respect at what Dean built. But mostly I’m just sad. Not in a “someone died” kind of way, more in a “I can’t believe the town newspaper shut down” kind of way. To me, that’s what Favrd always was, the newsletter (or take out menu, as it were) for our little community, not a community in and of itself.

Dean was clearly tired of being the town crier or enabler or whatever it was we all ultimately took Favrd for granted for being. I can’t fault him that and I thank him for what we had and thrill at the thought of his next project, I’m certain it will be excellent. I found some of you before that wonderful cock and I’ll find more of you after but it’s sort of amazing to think of what we had, fleeting though it may have been.