Dear Editor:

On March 14, 2018, Congress passed bank deregulations as was previously done by President Reagan. For the second time, I watched the movie “Too Big To Fail,” based on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book, “Too Big To Fail-The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System and Themselves.”

The 2007 economic crisis began when Wall Street fell off a cliff following the previous deregulations of President Reagan between 1981 to 1989. On April 25, 2016, on PBS, John Komlos, stated “. . . in the end, they all left the middle class staring into thin wallets while their manipulators were living high on the hog.” Inequality of wealth was already witnessed and the cost of taking on the wars of many others countries brought our debt into the trillions.

What does it mean when regulations were put back to avoid a repeat of the economic crash only to be removed again in 2018? Are we once again going to bail out the too big to fail banks who used the funds to reward their own management instead of feeding it into the economy? There are some big banks that have paid more than $10 million in fines in the past ten years and one has paid fines in the billions. These are fines for fraudulent punishment of customers who never missed mortgage payments, but were foreclosed upon and suffered egregious treatment including damage to their homes.

The regulations were to stop these banks from being able to scam their customers again.  How much this is due to Wall Street gamblers, I don’t know. 

How do we avoid an economic crash when protections are gone? How do we avoid an economic crash when we reduce tax income of the wealthy adding $1.5 trillion to our debt? How do we avoid an economic crash when we persist spending excess travel expenses of cabinet members, as well as expensive millions on golf trips? How do we avoid an economic crash that deepens the numbers in poverty, and ignores needed medical treatment of workers and their families? Where is the auditor?

Jarryl Larson

Edgecomb