Major Breaking News - Former Citicorp CEO calls for return of Glass Stegall & bank breakup. [View all]

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Sandford (Sandy) Weill the chief architect behind mega bank building and combining commercial bank activity with the aggressive and high risk investment banking has now called for a return to the old system and breaking up the big mega banks that now exist. Weill was known as “The Shatterer of Glass-Steagall.” The commenters who followed him on CNBC's Squakbox were stunned and speechless when they heard what their beloved 'Sandy' said about breaking up banks that are 'too big to fail'.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/weill-calls-for-splitting-up-big-banks/

They were words that no one ever expected Sanford I. Weill — the man who helped usher in the age of the financial supermarket — to utter.

“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking,” Mr. Weill, the former Citigroup chief executive, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “Have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”

His words were essentially a call for a return to Glass-Steagall, the financial regulation that for decades separated commercial banking from investment banking in an effort to keep the financial world safer and easier to regulate. And it was an admission rich with irony.
For it was Mr. Weill, the empire-builder who progressively built up an insignificant Baltimore-based lender into the towering financial services provider named Travelers and who erased Glass-Steagall with the $70 billion union of his firm with Citicorp in 1998.