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How many bank failures would have been avoided if US banking regulations hadn't been slackened so much?Most of the failures after 2000 would have been prevented. All of the 2008 financial crisis was caused by removing regulation.
Prior to Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 [0], several states ruled that credit default swaps were insurance and thus regulated CDS as insurance. Some states ruled that CDS were gambling and regulated it as gambling. The CFMA basically said "credit default swaps are now a federal issue and it will be regulated at the federal level" and set up a poorly funded agency that had no teeth until after the bailouts in 2008.
During the 1920s, many banks got involved in both commercial banking (taking deposits and making loans) as well as investment banking (arranging IPOs). In 1933, the Glass-Steagal Act [1] said that banks may do one or the other, but cannot do both. In 1999, Glass-Steagal was later repealed by GLBA [2] as CitiCorp was doing both (due to mergers) while daring the regulators to do anything about it.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernizatio...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Banking_Act
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bl...