>American manufacturing has been leaving this country due to punishing regulations, over-taxation and an unqualified, spoiled, lazy workforce. Mind you the American consumer has benefited greatly due to decreased prices.
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>Perhaps the government should turn local manufacturing over to the Japanese who seem to be able to open car factories in the US and grow market share at the expense of home-grown firms that are going under.
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>;-)

The auto companies are a different beast than manufacturing as a whole. The US manufacturers have made an awful series of business decisions from car design, worldwide marketing failures, nearly double-market labor contracts and crippling pensions to name a few. The federal bailout of Chrysler in 1979 contributed as well by sending the exact wrong message to the big 3.

>The solution was already found and implemented 80 years ago.
>
>It may be true that American depositors might have been less exposed, but banks disallowed to participate would have been vulnerable to competitors flush with cash from the bonanza, meaning that consolidation would have happened regardless. Then you'd be relying on the same irresponsible greedies to ensure that depositors are indeed protected with decent capital reserves and responsible lending decisions. You only have to look at AIG whose dominant global insurance empire was effectively destroyed by the antics of one small division to anticipate the likely result. Follow the consequences through FDIC and the rest of it and you're facing the same sort of chaos with a different name.

John, we've already been over this...Glass-Steagall would've directly prevented AIGs systemic risk as investment and commercial banks would be separate. While AIG would've still gotten into the CDS business, banks like BofA, Wells Fargo, WaMu, etc wouldn't have been allowed into the securities game. Without those huge sums of depositor cash in the system the security values and their CDSs never would've reached the BS heights they achieved. Countrywide, Lehman, AIG and others on the investment side would've been in trouble but the commercial side would've been protected.