Obama Opposes Glass-Stegall Wall Street Reg, Senators For

The Obama administration and key U.S. senators are butting heads over the reinstatement of a Depression era regulation for Wall Street.

 WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Obama administration and key U.S. senators are butting heads over the reinstatement of a Depression era regulation for Wall Street.

Team Obama is opposed to the Glass-Stegall Act while the bipartisan group of senators lead by Sens. John McCain and Maria Cantwell are for it.

 The Glass-Stegall Act of 1933 would separate the institutions of commercial and investment banking whereby it would be illegal for consumers’ deposits to be used on the stock market.

Using consumers’ deposites was one of the main causes of The Great Depression, according to federal investigators of that era.

However, Obama is against  instituting the Act back into law, which was repealed under the Clinton administration with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

Obama’s reasoning is that, as Newsweek magazine put it: “You can’t turn back the clock.”

“I think going back to Glass-Steagall would be like going back to the Walkman,” one senior Treasury official told Newsweek.

According to Bloomberg, John S. Reed, the former co-CEO of Citigroup, wishes to go back to the Walkman and make Glass-Steagall federal law.