Nightmare on Wall Street: Republicans & Democrats Agree on Reinstating Glass-Steagall Act, by Wolf Richter.

An amazing thing happened at the Republican Convention when some unexpected language showed up in the official 66-page Republican Platform 2016: …

We support reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which prohibits commercial banks from engaging in high-risk investment. …

Upon hearing about this, Wall Street executives and just about everyone else at JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and a slew of others, plus central bankers in the US and abroad, especially those that cut their teeth at Goldman Sachs, plus Treasury officials and revolving-door beneficiaries, they all ran to their respective johns and vomited.

Reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act would mean separating federally insured deposit-taking banks from everything else and limiting their activities to classic banking. …

This was a lesson learned during the Great Depression. Separating those risks from banks, and keeping banks smallish, worked for decades until a Republican Congress and President Clinton conspired to abolish the act.

Sounds arcane perhaps, but this would have a bigger effect on the lives of most readers than most of the political machinations that get into the news.