To the banks: Agree to the re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act. Banks will go back to being banks. Investment-banking (not at all the same thing), insurance, commodity trading and all the other non-banking businesses that banks have entered will be spun off--not to separate divisions (even if independently capitalized), but to separate companies. Banks that have more than a certain percentage of total banking capital will be broken up until no bank has more than a specified maximum that insures that no bank failure will endanger the system. (I'm quick to note that I do not know what that percentage should be. 1/2 of 1%? 1%? 2%? 5%? The latter seems too large to me, but perhaps a consensus of reputable economists would agree that it is not.)
And in return, we agree to amnesty: We won't put the bankers in jail for the criminal conduct that got us in so much trouble in 2008 and the following years.
Now, is that fair, or what?
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