Break up the banks

Phil Angelides was the chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concluded that the major cause of the Great Recession was the banks and their infatuation with complex mortgage derivatives.  He's still convinced that something has to be done about the banks and thinks that the something should be breaking them up.  Here are his comments:

[T]heir fierce resistance to any kind of reasonable change, the unrestrained use of their enormous political power and their willingness to use whatever means necessary to bend the political system to their self-interest without respect to the public interest, have provided in my mind the conclusive evidence that a modern era of trust-busting is now essential….

Here we are, two years after Dodd-Frank, there’s still no Volcker Rule after a voracious and sustained attack to eviscerate it by financial institutions. And of course those efforts have been bolstered, I want to be blunt, by the Republican allies of Wall Street in Congress who have tirelessly tried to strip funding from the Securities and Exchange Commission, from the Commodities Future Trading Commission, and have made an art form of blocking appointments to key regulatory positions that oversee our financial system.