A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

To make the most of RN, other laws had to be dismantled, like the Glass-Steagall Act (GS). Passed as part of the New Deal, GS restricted banks from engaging in riskier (if potentially more lucrative) activities that were unrelated to their core business. The Federal Reserve opened some questionable loopholes to GS in the 1980s, but the law remained on the books. By 1998—about four years after the government wound up the last of the S&Ls—Citicorp merged with Travelers Insurance to form Citigroup. The combination would have violated what remained of GS, and unless that law were repealed, Citi would have to divest many assets it had just acquired, making the transaction costly and pointless. However, Citi’s CEO was confident the Boomer neoliberal establishment would see the light. It did. By 1999, thanks to intense lobbying of Gingrich, Clinton, et al., the law was officially buried, and the head of Citi sported a trophy lauding himself as the “Shatterer of Glass-Steagall” (hopefully not a conscious invocation of Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita during the first A-bomb tests).