PRESS RELEASE
Wall Street Insists: There Will Be No Glass-Steagall
Nov. 11, 2016 (EIRNS)—While progressive Democrats talk publicly about collaborating with Donald Trump on restoring the 1933 Glass-Steagall banking separation law, Wall Street financial institutions are going all-out to assure themselves their casus belli won’t happen.
They began by managing to float a rumor that Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase was being looked to by Trump’s team as Treasury Secretary, an event which surely would appear to doom Glass-Steagall. Then-transition chief Chris Christie was reported by CNN this morning to be telling financial lobbyists that Trump could be talked out of Glass-Steagall in 10 minutes.
By Friday, Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling had replaced Dimon in the Treasury rumors, however, and the golem apprentice Christie had been "fired," pushed aside by vice president-elect Mike Pence as head of the Trump transition team.
Financial press continued to pour out reports that Glass-Steagall would be the first bank regulation change to be thrown on the cutting room floor. American Banker’s "Trump Is Unlikely To Bring Back Glass-Steagall"; the Financial Times’ "Trump and the markets: six impossible things" one of them Glass-Steagall; and Forbes’ "The Best Thing That’s Happened to Banks in Years" were typical of a flood of self-reassuring commentaries. CNN posted several articles on Trump’s getting his advisors from the hedge fund swamp rather than "draining it"; and Business Insider declared Glass-Steagall "not likely to be a priority for the incoming Administration."
Glass-Steagall, cannot wait on the priorities of a President Trump, who has himself been pushed to campaign for it by the American people’s desire to see justice done to Wall Street. Restoring Glass-Steagall is now an urgent matter between the American people and the Congress; the fight for it is on again as Congress returns to Washington this week. Economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche said today he intends a mobilization of his activists and supporting forces in high gear immediately to push it through. Any attempt by Obama to veto it, as he tried with the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, will finish him off.