Earlier this week there was a major earthquake shaking through Wall Street.Unlike the physical kind, this quake did not cause buildings to sway or roads to buckle.  But, make no mistake about it, when Sandy Weill publicly stated on CNBC that Glass-Steagall needs to be reinstated, a 9.0+ was recorded on the financial Richter scale.  You know the financial industry is broken and “Dodd-Frank” rendered worthless when the founder of “too big to fail” asks the government to break up the banks so they do not destroy the US economy!

Sandy Weill was the politically connected CEO of Travelers who created “too big to fail”.  In 1998, he single handedly lobbied Congress and the Clinton Administration to repeal Glass-Steagall, allowing investment banks to combine with commercial banks so the insurance company he controlled could gobble up Citibank (at the time the largest bank in America).  After the merger was completed, but before the two firms were legally combined, the law was repealed and the predicted free for all on Wall Street that could only end in financial ruin began!

The much ballyhooed experiment in capitalism that ended 14 years later in the greatest financial meltdown since the Great Depression was not the straw that broke the camel’s back for Sandy.  It was the manipulation by Wall Street to gut the protections originally proposed by Dodd-Frank and the fact that JP Morgan Chase basically committed the same error within 2 years of the enactment of the law that compelled the father of “too big to fail”  to recant!

I give Sandy Weill a lot of credit for disavowing his prior actions so publicly.  I just hope the country recognizes an earthquake when it happens and reacts before we are devastated by another circa 2008 financial tsunami.