Seven Red

Byron Dorgan arguing against Gramm-Leach-Bliley, November 4, 1999.

Now we got all these folks here who know a lot more about this than I do, I must admit, who say, “Well, except we’re creating firewalls. We’ve got subsidiaries, we’ve got affiliates, we’ve got firewalls.” They’ve got everything except common sense. Everything except common sense. And everything, apparently, except a primer on history. I just wish before people would vote for this bill they’d be forced to read just a bit of the financial history of this country to understand how consequential this decision is going to be. Now, I obviously am in a minority here. We’ve got people who’ve dressed in their best suits, and they just think this is the greatest piece of legislation that’s ever been given to Congress, and we’ve got choruses of folks standing outside this chamber who’ve spent their lifetimes working to get this done, to say “Would you just forget all that nonsense back in the 1930’s about bank failures and Glass-Steagall and the requirement to separate risk from banking enterprise? Would you just forget all that? God, time has moved on, let’s understand that. Change with the times!” We’ve got folks outside who’ve worked on this very hard and who very much want this to happen and we’ve got a lot of folks in here who are very compliant, to say “Absolutely, let me be the lead singer.” And here we are.

We’ve got this bill, which—I’ll bet—five, ten, fifteen years from now we’ll be back thinking this bill like we thought of the bill passed in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in which this Congress unhitched the savings and loans so that some little sleepy Texas institution can gather deposits from all around America and like a giant rocket become a huge enterprise and guess what? With all the speculation, and the S&L’s, and broker deposits, and all the things that went with it that this Congress allowed, what did it cost the American tax payers to bail out that bunch of failures? What did it cost? Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars! I’ll bet one day somebody’s going to look back at this and they’re going to say “How on earth could we have thought it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate through mergers and acquisition to become bigger and bigger and bigger, far more firms in the category of too big to fail, how did we think that was going to help this country?”

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