The conditions that led to the collapse of the highly-speculative sub-prime mortgage market were put into place in November of 1999, with the passage that month of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which rescinded decades-old regulatory restrictions that might have prevented the runaway speculation in "synthetic" derivatives.

The 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley essentially repealed the Glass–Steagall Act, which was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Glass-Steagall introduced banking reforms that were designed to prevent the consolidation of commercial banks, investment banks, mortgage lenders, securities traders (brokerages), and insurance companies. Glass-Steagall also imposed regulation on speculative trading, at the very least, it made such trading transparent so that nothing was done in back-rooms that was designed to rob investors.

Glass-Steagall was designed to prevent exactly the kind of collaboration that brought us the Goldman-Sachs fraud. Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 by a Republican-controlled Congress who pushed for the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill. Gramm-Leach-Bliley was named after its three sponsors, all of them Republicans: Congressmen Phil Gramm (R-Texas), Jim Leach (R-Iowa) and Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (R-Virginia). The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act tore down the regulatory framework that would have helped protect against the sub-prime mortgage bubble and the speculation that led to a collapse of the market where speculators traded the "derivative" securities that were created from those sub-prime mortgages.

The results are not unintended consequences.