This bit of link bait has been making the rounds, and I can’t resist the urge to help it spread.
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”Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ”This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”
The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system.
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”I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930′s is true in 2010,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota.
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”The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,” said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.
– CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS
New York Times – November 5, 1999
Personal blog of 
have you seen the recent PBS thing on the deficit? basically, they said it was Bush’s fault for spending (on the war & esp Medicare Rx law) and not raising taxes.
I find it pretty tough to blame any one thing in such a complex system. Clinton pushed lenders to make credit available to everyone and Congress made it easier for financial firms to do so. Financial services obliged, grew to be 20% of the economy, and decided that the laws of nature no longer applied to them. Bush lowered taxes and we responded by consuming even more. A few years of feedback between those elements, and…