Memo at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis

"The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.

Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: “derivatives trading”. JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as “assets”.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (also Obama's leading choice for Federal Reserve chairman) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives."

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo