I bet you have never heard of the Depository Institutions Deregulatory and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (DIDMCA) or the Garn-St. Germain act of 1982. Those acts, one signed by President Carter and the other signed by President Reagan, helped create the financial mess in which we find ourselves.

The DIDMCA effectively ended all the states usury laws. It meant that if a state decided that interest rates on mortgages and credit cards should be capped at 5%, that state was stopped from doing so.  The Garn-St. Germain Act permitted a “shadow banking system” to develop without any of the regulations required of banks.  In effect the Garn-St.Germain Act cut the savings and loan institutions loose from any regulation.

There are other Congressional acts as the financial elites slowly carved their way out of Glass-Steagall Act of the Great Depression (which required commercial and investment banks to be separate and required insurance and brokerage houses to be separate) until banking regulation disappeared.  What a country!

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