It's the 10th anniversary of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. That's right, 10 years ago the Clinton administration abolished the Depression era legislation. Glass-Steagall was passed under the Roosevelt administration in 1933 to stop the Wall Street shenanigans that had ushered in the Great Depression where banks getting their own depositors to buy the stocks the banks were dealing. The idea behind Glass-Steagall was to keep banks from speculating with the savings that American citizens were entrusting within their vaults.

In its repeal, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act signed in by President Bill Clinton allowed commercial banks to merge with investment banks. And because banks were now allowed to cover both sides of the street, they could sell mortgages to homeowners, and then invent fancy investment structures which they could then sell on Wall Street. And there was no shortage of suckers that snapped them up. The result: the market meltdown which has left the global economy in ruins.

To remind us who the culprits are, Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone , represents us with some appalling quotes from Clinton and Phil Gramm. He reminds us that the other culprits include the then Treasury secretary, now Obama economics czar Larry Summers, Gary Gensler, then a treasury undersecretary, today the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gene Sperling, then head of Clinton's National Economics Council, now a senior counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Linda Robertson, another assistant Treasury secretary who is now a senior adviser to the Federal Reserve. No wonder Obama's Wall Street reforms are useless.

A big hat tip to the Little Sis blog which unearthed an article from a 1999 edition of American Banker reporting on the celebrations.

"To mark the historic occasion, House Banking Committee Chairman Jim Leach played host to a group of his closest collaborators on the bill, including Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, Comptroller of the Currency John D. Hawke Jr., Treasury Under Secretary Gary Gensler, and Rep. John J. LaFalce, D-N.Y. They joined staff members, lobbyists, and reporters in drinking champagne and devouring a large cake, which bore an epitaph for the Depression-era separation of commercial and investment banking that the bill undoes. It read: 'Glass-Steagall, R.I.P., 1933-1999'."

Little did they know the cake was a commentary on the demise of the US and global economy.