The U.S. banks and investment houses can't forget the recent days when they were able to trade glass beads (debt obligations) for gold like the Spanish explorers arriving in North America around 1492-93 and trading with the American Indians.

Wall Street resists all attempts at regulation and oversight hoping to resume its wayward ways of continuing a scam that brought the international financial markets to their knees and created the present economic crisis.

Paul A. Volker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, have a reliable formula that would ease our fears of a repeat financial disaster.

They recommend that the banks be split from the investment houses. The anti-trust division should be interested in preventing these giant corporations from growing into monopolies.

Let's hope that the above-quoted economic wizards be heeded by the Obama administration.

Howard N. Stewart

Manchester