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And because Congress learned nothing from the dot-com crash and declined to restore the Glass-Steagall fence, the crash led to *another* bubble, this time in subprime mortgages, and then, inevitably, we suffered the Great Financial Crisis.
Look: there's no virtue in having bank regulations for the sake of having them. It is conceptually possible for bank regulations to be useless or even harmful.
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There's nothing wrong with investigating whether the 70-year old Glass-Steagall Act was still needed in 1999. But Clinton was provided with a *mountain* of evidence about why Glass-Steagall was the only thing standing between Americans and economic chaos, including the evidence of the S&L Crisis, which was still underway when he took office, and he ignored all of them.
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If you lost everything - your home, your savings, your pension - in the dot-bomb or the Great Financial Crisis, Bill Clinton is to blame. He was warned. he ignored the warnings.
Fuck that guy.
No, seriously, *fuck* Bill Clinton. Deregulating banks wasn't Clinton's only passion. He also wanted to ban working cryptography. The cornerstone of Clinton's tech policy was the "Clipper Chip," a backdoored encryption chip that, by law, every technology was supposed to use.
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If Clipper had gone into effect, then cops, spooks, and anyone who could suborn, bribe, or trick a cop or a spook could break into any computer, server, mobile device, or embedded system in America.
When Clinton was told - over and over, in small, easy-to-understand words - that there was no way to make a security system that only worked when "bad guys" tried to break into it, but collapsed immediately if a "good guy" wanted to bypass it.
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We explained to him - oh, how we explained to him! - that working encryption would be all that stood between your pacemaker's firmware and a malicious update that killed you where you stood; all that stood between your antilock brakes' firmware and a malicious update that sent you careening off a cliff; all that stood between businesses and corporate espionage, all that stood between America and foreign state adversaries wanting to learn its secrets.
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In response, Clinton said the same thing that *all* of his successors in the Crypto Wars have said: NERD HARDER! Just figure it out. Cops need to look at bad guys' phones, so you need to figure out how to make encryption that keeps teenagers safe from sextortionists, but melts away the second a cop tries to unlock a suspect's phone. Take Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister.
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When he was told that the laws of mathematics dictated that it was impossible to build selectively effective encryption of the sort he was demanding, he replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":
Fuck that guy. Fuck Bill Clinton. Fuck a succession of UK Prime Ministers who have repeatedly attempted to ban working encryption. Fuck 'em all.
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The stakes here are obscenely high. They have been warned, and all they say in response is "NERD HARDER!"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/
Now, of course, "crypto means cryptography," but the *other* crypto - cryptocurrency - deserves a look-in here. Cryptocurrency proponents advocate for a system of deregulated money creation, AKA "wildcat currencies." They say, variously, that central banks are no longer needed; or that we *never* needed central banks to regulate the money supply.
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Let's take away that fence. Why not? It's not fit for purpose today, and maybe it never was.
Why do we have central banks? The Fed - which is far from a perfect institution and could use substantial reform or even replacement - was created because the age of wildcat currencies was a nightmare. Wildcat currencies created wild economic swings, massive booms and even bigger busts.
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Wildcat currencies are why abandoned haunted mansions feature heavily in the American imagination: US towns and cities were dotted with giant mansions built by financiers who got rich as bubbles expanded, and lost it all in the crash.
Prudent management of the money supply didn't end those booms and busts, but it substantially dampened them, ending the "business cycle" that once terrorized Americans, destroying their towns and livelihoods and wiping out their savings.
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It shouldn't surprise us that a new wildcat money sector, flogging "decentralized" cryptocurrencies (that they are nevertheless weirdly anxious to swap for your gross, boring old "fiat" money) has created a series of massive booms and busts, with insiders getting richer and richer, and retail investors losing everything.
If there was ever any doubt about whether wildcat currencies could be made safe by putting them on a blockchain, it is gone.
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