Apr. 2, Interview - Many blame the deregulation of the last 30 years, which culminated in major deregulation of the financial industry in the 90's as one of the reasons for the current financial crisis. Nomi Prins, Senior Fellow at Demos and author of Other People's Money gives some insight into the background of this financial crisis.

"..in the twenties we had a crash, and the crash was due to a lot of factors including the convoluted nature of the banking system back then. In 1933, FDR put forth in his New Deal the Glass Stiegel Act which effectively decoupled the activities of banks, so you had separate commercial banks doing business with consumers, savings, lending, regular things, and then you had the investment banks doing the speculation."

"In the mid to late 90's, there was a lot of conversation in Congress and pressure from Wall Street to merge these institutions again, most notably, byu the old CEO Sandy Weill of Citigroup. There was a repeal of that act that passed in 1999 that allowed commercial and investment banking to merge under one umbrella, and that is pretty much the problem that we have inherited that has culminated in the crisis that we see today, as well as a lot of the scandals that were, Enron and Worldcomm.."

"..in fact, there was a number of deregulatory acts that happened in the Clinton Administration. There was deregulation of the industries, energy and telecom, which produced Enron and Worldcomm. And there was the deregulation of the financial markets, which was a bipartisan deregulation, which happened under the Clinton administration."

"The argument was... that effectively we were not going to be competitive as a nation if we weren't going to allow our banks to merge in the same ways that international banks were doing with out the regulations that the old Glass Stiegal Act had imposed. And, there wasn't really a lot of questioning at the time..."