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Comment by TomMckenny | Hacker News Reader

Seems 2008 didn't cause enough misery for voters to understand their own interest.

But maybe the next one will be bad enough, or the one after that worse yet. I gather the last time this happened (1870s-1930s) it was a lot of fun.

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Not being snarky--but did Trump promise anything specifically about bank regulation when he was campaigning?

Maybe the populist "drain the swamp" could be taken as a vague direction on this issue, but in any case he seems to have done the opposite.

He said he wanted to "dismantle" Dodd-frank entirely. So he wanted to deregulate much more than this bill does.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/politics/trump-dodd-fr...

The Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin more eloquently broke down their plan during his hearing in where he stated his primary goal is reducing the spurious regulations added to small/medium banks follow the crisis, while leaving the regulations for the large ones (most of which caused the original crisis). Which is exactly what this bill does by excluding big banks from the new reductions in regulation.

He provided many examples and cited data showing how the number of small banks has drastically shrunk since the regulation has passed, and directly related to it, causing the US banking market to further consolidate.

Ironically, there are now 5 major banks who control most of the market now largely as a result, while competition from smaller firms has declined drastically. So much for ending "too big to fail". Like most well intentioned democratic policy during the last decade intended to punish the larger banks for their destructive behavior, if anything they've come our stronger. Not to mention the bail outs with completely neutered terms in terms of bonuses and other potential disincentives for bad behavior.

It's one thing to say you want to restrict the power of banks to manipulate markets and generate risk, it's another to actually do it.

The fact this bill only benefitted small firms and kept the major banks under check sounds completely consistent with the Mnuchin's promises during his congressional hearing. He's on of the few Trump cabinet that seems highly competent and well suited for the job. I'm happy he has stuck around.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?421858-1/treasury-secretary-no...

Thank you. I've been disturbed by much (though not all) of the coverage of this as if it's a complete repeal of Dodd-Frank.

This was a bipartisan act of congress, not a Trump thing.

It was both. It was a Trump campaign promise and some Democrats voted for it.

How many Dem votes before a bill can be labeled bipartisan? 1? In my mind bipartisan should practically be nearly equal representation from both sides.

In my mind the bill needs significant representation from both sides to be bipartisan, but not necessarily equal. Unfortunately this had that.

Curious why this was downvoted? It is an honest question.

> Seems 2008 didn't cause enough misery for voters to understand their own interest.

This is just passive aggressive nonsense echoing the meme that the Dems represent citizens' interest any better than the GOP.

So what's the solution? Keep voting Democrat forever?

You can't realistically ask a population to vote a party or politician forever. The real solution is to reform the U.S. political system so that people don't have Republicans as their only alternative to Democrats when the Democrats become too corrupt, as well, or people just grow tired of some of their policies.

So what's the solution? Keep voting Democrat forever?

Remind me who was President when the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed? That’s at the heart of all of this. And the so-called Community Reinvestment Act.

Bill Clinton

Yes, Bill Clinton was a triangulating centrist who ended up with a kind of “Republican lite” message: still “business friendly” but now with less treasonous criminal conspiracy or international war crimes or outright war on labor or gross fiscal irresponsibility vs. the previous two administrations.

After his policy agenda got derailed (especially healthcare which he hoped would be one of his signature achievements) and his party was wrecked in the midterms, and then he got dragged into years of frenzied investigations into nothing, he ended up signing a lot of the legislation that the GOP-controlled legislature put on his desk over the coming few years, because he thought that would help him out politically. It didn’t really work, but we got a lot of terrible policy out of it.

I don’t think it’s fair to blame “Democrats” in general for a GOP-driven policy agenda though, just because Clinton didn’t veto every bill that came across his desk.

Also, in comparison to the administrations either before or after him (or if we compare their Supreme Court picks, ugh) Clinton looks positively dreamy.

Yeah, ever since Bill Clinton the democrats have been Republicans, and the Republicans have been ... something new.

Let's not be stupid... The repeal of Glass Stegal was the "Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act" in 1999. Those are 3 republicans in the name of that act. It was a republican house and Senate and some of the last months of the Clinton administration AFTER Bush had won election. It would've been passed under Bush but this way Clinton was able to also get some policies the Democratic party wanted in a lame duck session before he left.

False equivalencies do not make both parties the same.

Don't forget the Commodities Futures Modernization Act when assessing the damage of 21st century banking and the, ahem, "Great Recovery"....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernizat...

A viable multiple party system is likely ideal but would need reformists in charge to bring it about.

Historically in the US, parties undergo radical change: FDR's party is very different from Wilson and even more so than Andrew Johnson; Harding's is very different than Lincoln's. We are in what is called the 6th party system if I'm not mistaken.

So practically speaking it could be that the primaries are more important than the actual elections.

First past the post systems generally converge to a two party equilibrium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

This is true, but it's orthogonal to the changes in parties themselves.

Sometimes a party goes away in name but continues in spirit, at other times an existing name is retained but the core philosophy of the party changes enormously.

For example the ordinary term for members of the Conservative and Unionist Party in England is "Tories" but legally Tories are a different and much older political party. The allegiances and policies shifted, those who opposed Whiggs in parliament hundreds of years ago and those today arguing about how exactly to leave the EU have almost nothing in common beyond being vaguely "centre-right".

Vote for sane republicans in the primaries?

People who vote in primaries are often more invested in their party's ideology than those who don't. They then choose people who best represent that ideology best, regardless of their capability of running. Hence why We've seen more and more extreme candidates taking primaries.

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