Brooklyn Law School BrooklynWorks Faculty Scholarship 2012 Democracy and Productivity: The Glass-Steagall Act and the Shifting Discourse of Financial Regulation K. Sabeel Rahman
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/faculty Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, and the Other Law Commons Recommended Citation 24 J. Pol'y History 612 (2012) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by BrooklynWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of BrooklynWorks. k . s abeel r ahman Democracy and Productivity: The Glass-Steagall Act and the Shifting Discourse of Financial Regulation In the fall of 2008, the United States experienced a sudden fi nancial crisis that plunged the fi nancial sector into disarray, provoked the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and gave rise to an ongoing series of highly contentious debates over economic regulation. Two years later, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, one of the largest overhauls of fi nancial regulation in history. Th roughout this debate, much of the discourse of fi nancial reform revolved around concepts such as consumer protection, the problem of the “systemic risk” posed by the failure of fi nancial institutions that could have vast negative spillover eff ects, and the clash between proponents and critics of expanded federal regulatory oversight. 1 But despite deep-seated public anger against fi nancial fi rms and accusations of abusive practices of securitization and subprime mortgage lending, the public discourse of reform politics exhibited little evidence of more aggressive arguments against the concentrated economic and political Th e author would like to thank David Moss for suggesting this area of research and for his thoughtful comments throughout.