2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: PSA: How many people here who love to hate "Wall Street" actually know what it means? [View all]Armstead
(47,803 posts)Wall St. is is a physical reference to a place, but it is also a term used as a symbol for a complex matrix of institutions and people and issues.
The underlying purpose of Wall St. may be good, but it has become distorted and monsterous over the last 35 years, thanks both to the GOP and Democrats like the Clintons. (and the Clintons are a team with the same friends and connections in the matrix)
It has been changed from a legitimate marketplace where companies raise money to a casino where financial vehicles are used to create money with money -- instead of production and services.
And it has screwed America by placing excess pressure to generate profits for investors who flip stocks and use the money to flip more stocks quickly, rather than investments based on good performance of a company.
It has also become a defacto monopoly, thanks to deregulation championed by the Clintons and their cronies.
It's a lot more complicated than that obviously, but to address your point -- People who are critical of what it has become are not stupid. It is a real problem, whether you care to admit it or not.
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http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/bill_clinton_the_republicans_m.php
...what about the deregulatory legislation Bill Clinton signed in 1994, before Gingrich & Co. took Congress?
Riegle-Neal hasnt got a tenth of the press that the CMFA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley have, but it was a milestone in the creation of Too Big to Fail, allowing banks to cross state lines, effectively gutting state regulation of banking. The Christian Science Monitor that year quoted a Wall Street analyst saying that, It also didnt hurt that NationsBank president Hugh McColl has a working relationship with President Clinton or that the comptroller of the currency, Eugene Ludwig, was a successful lawyer at Covington & Burling and NationsBank had been a major client. Hugh McColl gave us Bank of America.
From across the pond, The Independent wrote in a piece that was prescient in more ways than one:
In effect, Congress has said let the merger mania begin. There is virtual consensus that the legislation will allow both the big US banks and their foreign rivals in America - British banks among them - to grow much bigger.
Nor was that the only thing the banks got that year. The American Banking Association wrote about Riegle-Neal, the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1994, and the Community Banking Development Act that the 103rd will be remembered as the first Congress in recent memory to pass clean pro-banking legislation.
Clinton, on signing Riegle-Neal, praised McColl and the head of Chase Manhattan, and said, It represents another example of our intent to reinvent Government by making it less regulatory and less overreaching and by shrinking it where it ought to be shrunk and reshaping it where it ought to be reshaped.
Again, this was before the Republicans took over Congress.
In 1999, on signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, Clinton said, This is a day we can celebrate as an American day and that the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live and today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority and This is a very good day for the United States.