Dear John,

It’s time to make banking boring again.

When banks gamble with your money and win, they privatize the gains. When banks gamble with your money and lose, and the taxpayers bail them out, they socialize the losses.

Heads the banks win, tails we lose.

But it hasn’t always been this way, and it doesn’t have to be. Watch this week’s video to see how a simple legislative solution can fix this problem. It worked before, and it can work again>>

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Glass-Steagall was a law passed in 1933 to stabilize the banks during the Great Depression. It established a clear separation between commercial banks, in the business of taking deposits and making loans, and investment banks, gambling on the stock market. Banks had to choose one or the other, and for over 60 years, routine banking became more reliable -- and boring.

But in the 1990s, the big banks wanted their casino back, and they succeeded in getting Congress to cut back key provisions of Glass-Steagall, finally repealing the law altogether under the Clinton administration with the support of Republicans and some Democrat lawmakers in 1999.

Not surprisingly, deregulation of banking led again to excessive gambling, and a replay of the Great Crash. In 2008, millions of Americans lost their jobs, their savings, and their homes. But the banks, deemed “too big to fail,” were bailed out at taxpayer expense.

The reforms of the Dodd-Frank Act that followed were not enough, and they were soon watered down significantly. Now once again we face the prospect of bank failures and bailouts, and once again taxpayers are left holding the bag.

Banks should not be casinos. It is time to separate Wall Street from Main Street and stop banks from gambling with other people’s money. Check out our latest video now.

Congress can prevent the next financial meltdown by bringing back Glass-Steagall -- but hardly anyone is talking about it.

Thank you for working with us to get the message out and help change the narrative in our nation’s capital.

Robert Reich
Inequality Media