FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, May 4, 2017
Contact: Nick Jacobs, 202-618-6430 or njacobs@bettermarkets.com

Washington, D.C. – As President Trump, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and others focusing on bringing back a “Glass-Steagall-type law,” Better Markets is releasing a Fact Sheet on Glass-Steagall to provide critical background on the original law and perspectives on the issues now being debated.  The Fact Sheet addresses the following questions:

What is Glass-Steagall?
What happened to the Glass-Steagall law?
What happened when Glass-Stegall was repealed?
What did all this have to do with the financial crash in 2008?
Who is against the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall-like protections?
What are the arguments against doing that?

“The growing debate about a Glass-Steagall-like law needs to be informed by facts, context and history.  Passed in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, Glass-Steagall was the key structural legal protection created to shield hardworking American families on Main Street from the most high risk, dangerous financial activities by Wall Street’s biggest firms.  For over 60 years, the law worked, until it was repealed in 1999,” said Dennis Kelleher, President and CEO of Better Markets, a nonprofit advocacy organization promoting the public interest in the financial markets.

“The repeal of Glass-Steagall was a key part of the financial deregulatory frenzy of the 1990s that dismantled the key financial protections and led, in part, to the financial crash of 2008 that caused more than $20 trillion of economic wreckage across the country,” continued Kelleher. “At its core, the debate over a new Glass-Steagall is about restoring those protections, preventing another crash and taxpayer-funded bailouts.”

[The Fact Sheet can be found here.]

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Better Markets is a non-profit, non-partisan, and independent organization founded in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to promote the public interest in the financial markets, support the financial reform of Wall Street and make our financial system work for all Americans again. Better Markets works with allies – including many in finance – to promote pro-market, pro-business and pro-growth policies that help build a stronger, safer financial system that protects and promotes Americans’ jobs, savings, retirements and more. To learn more, visit www.bettermarkets.com.