The top oversight official for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout says the program will “almost certainly” result in a loss for US taxpayers. Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky also says he’s conducting sixty-five probes into possible fraud by bailout recipients. Barofsky’s comments came on the tenth anniversary of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a key deregulatory move widely seen as helping lead to the nation’s financial collapse. The repeal ended the separation of commercial and investment banking. In this clip from before the 1999 vote, Senator Byron Dorgan of South Dakota predicted how the repeal would be remembered on its tenth anniversary.
Sen. Byron Dorgan: “We are, with this piece of legislation, moving towards greater risk. We are almost certainly moving towards substantial new concentration and mergers in the financial services industry, that is almost certainly not in the interests of consumers. And we are deliberately and certainly, with this legislation, moving towards inheriting much greater risk in our financial services industries. And so, I come to the floor to say that I regret that I cannot support the legislation. I think we will, in ten years’ time, look back and say we should not have done that, because we forgot the lessons of the past.”