OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Glass-Steagall

Floor Speech

Date: April 10, 2019
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Finance and Banking Economy and Fiscal

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, I rise today to introduce the Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2019, a bill to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. In the wake of the Great Depression, the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act was passed in order to separate commercial and investment banks, and prevent Wall Street from gambling with the head-earned money of the American people.

Tragically, the big banks and their crony lobbyists pushed Congress to repeal the law in 1999. This deeply misguided deregulation may have benefitted a few wealthy bankers. However, it opened the floodgates to the growth of financial institutions that are too big to fail and encouraged the type of risky behaviors that led to the crash of the American financial system in 2008.

Although we made significant progress with the Dodd-Frank Act, large commercial and investment banks are still tied together in an institutional risk which poses dramatic systemic risk to the financial well-being of our country. I urge my colleagues to join me in passing the Prudent Banking Act to reimplement the vital protections of the Glass-Steagall Act that serve to ensure the security and stability of our financial system.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT


Source
arrow_upward