Lessons from the Great Depression and what “we” forgot

Robert Kuttner puts the current financial crisis into a 1929 perspective. Here's an excerpt.

Supposedly, 1929 could not happen again because of "what we learned." We learned that in a financial panic, the Federal Reserve needs to pour in heaps of "liquidity" -- money -- as the Fed failed to do after October 1929. One of the world's reigning experts on the Fed's failures of the early 1930s is one Ben Bernanke, and he certainly hasn't been stingy with the Fed's billions.

But the other lesson was the one "we" forgot -- not to let banks and other financial institutions turn themselves into casinos. It is helpful, in the spirit of Tonto's historic interrogatory to the Lone Ranger -- "What you mean, we?" -- to unpack that "we." The "we" who forgot the lessons included first and foremost Republican ideology -- deregulate everything and let markets run wild; secondly Bush administration regulatory officials who disdained even the regulations on the books; and third, the Wall Street Democrats who were de-regulation's willing enablers.