America’s wealth and economic power was built upon its superabundant natural resources including oil, minerals, lumber and rolling prairies. But the nation’s greatness rested on the brilliant exploitation of these resources by driving entrepreneurs, whose “can-do” spirit filtered down to their workforce.

The names Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan are only the best-known of a relatively small group of often ruthless businessmen who built huge industrial empires. Depending on your point of view, they were either brilliant Captains of Industry or remorseless Robber Barons, who steam-rolled legislators and labor while they amassed massive fortunes.

For good or bad, and on balance, it has to be seen as for the good, these men unleashed the industrial genius of their country. A few of them crashed and burned through unwise speculation but gradually the buccaneering edges of the survivors were rubbed off them by legislators. Congress looked for instance to break up monopolies and introduce laws on health and safety, workers’ rights and the protection of investors.

But the balance between the national interest and powerful industrial and financial combines has always been delicate. In the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929, the Glass-Steagall act forced banks to separate their ultimately disastrous trading activities from their day-to-day business on which the economy was so dependent. Then 71 years later, Glass-Steagall was scrapped. It only took nine years before those who predicted a financial disaster were proved right.

The 2008 Wall Street crash was caused in large measure by crazy and fundamentally dishonest speculation, driven by banks trading on their own account. In 2010 Congress introduced the Dodd-Franks reforms which put back in place most of the original Glass-Steagall restrictions. Known as the “Volcker Rule” after the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, it in particular forced the banks to cease trading on their own account. Bankers’ protests that it would push up trading costs and damage the economy have proven completely unfounded.

It might have been expected that after the global economic carnage caused the repeal of Glass-Steagall, it would have been at least another 70 years before there was a move to trash Dodd-Franks and the Volcker Rule. But not a bit of it. US regulators are being pressed to abandon most of the 2010 protections. Those who do not learn the lessons are history are clearly doomed to repeat them.

It is not simply that the world does not need to be plunged into another recession so soon after recovering, and that not completely, from the fall-out of the disastrous financial shenanigans of the first decade of this century. There is also the issue that much of the wild speculation that wrecked jobs, lives and whole economies in 1929 and again in 2008 actually had nothing to do with banking and the funding of productive investment through the stock market.

Instead the financial markets had become a crowded casino where no one was content with modest, sustainable returns. Bearing no relation to underlying economies, they have come to exist very largely for themselves alone, yet their collapse has twice had dire consequences for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The ancient Egyptians portrayed a mythical creature, the Ouroboros, which was a snake that ate it own tail. This, some might argue, epitomizes the worst excesses of the financial markets.