Glass-Steagall Fight Breaks Into the Major Italian Media

May 19, 2010 (LPAC)— Corriere della Sera, Italy's largest daily newspaper, published an article by economics editor Massimo Mucchetti on Monday, May 17, endorsing the Cantwell-McCain amendment now before the U.S. Senate, which would re-establish the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking, and calling for its emulation in Europe.

Under the headline "Banks: The Example of the U.S. Senate; A Bipartisan Proposal To Reform the Financial System," Mucchetti writes: "They insist. Arizona Senator John McCain and Senator Maria Cantwell of the state of Washington, have formalized their project, announced last December, to reintroduce the Glass-Steagall Act in an amendment to the reform of the financial sector promoted by the White House. McCain, a former military officer, is 74 years old and is a Republican. Cantwell, a 52-year- old environmentalist, is a Democrat. In their view, commercial banking must be again separated from investment banking, as the 1933 legislation (repealed in 1999) prescribed. Their amendment is bipartisan and the reform spokesman, Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, is supposed to include it in the discussion. It will be seen, then, where President Obama, who today is against it, and the Senate will stand...

"In Italy, instead, the reform of financial regulations seems to be hostage to the committee of central bankers who meet in Basel. And yet, we have a bill that in 1993 tore down the firewalls between the two kinds of banking activities, which had been erected by the 1933 Banking Act, exactly as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did in America. But the Italian Parliament expresses no opinion on the subject... Not one meeting, among the many useless ones that are held, re-examines choices made in the '90s."

Mucchetti's article was picked up by the daily Il Giornale, whose editors, however, expressed pessimism about the outcome of the battle in the U.S. Senate. "Obama is not strong enough to challenge the banking establishment," they write, and compare Obama to someone who, faced with people driving a car at 300 kmh, with gasoline cans in the trunk, tells them to slow down to 270. "That is already something. But if you crash at 270, you die as well. And the cans explode."