Wall Street and "Big Government" are intertwined -- to defeat regulation. The repeal of Glass-Steagall is only the most visible; both the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments are opposed to strong regulators who would work proactively to limit the abuses. The belief that Wall Street can regulate itself (with of course the federal government in the background to bail them out) is the cause of the current crisis. Competent, independent regulators actually helped prevent a brewing mortgage crisis very similar to this one in the early nineties, but by the time this crisis came along the senior regulators who actually knew what they were doing had been weeded out of the agencies, in part, because they are more expensive and in part because of ideology.