Everywhere we turn now, the similarities between today's events and The Great Depression are springing up as fast as the daises.

And like ghosts, a few forgotten figures have suddenly sprung from the pages of the past, reminding us that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Yesterday, there were the words of Marriner S. Eccles, whose description of what caused the Great Depression had an eerie an ring to it

Today, it is the words of one Ferdinand Pecora—someone else you've probably never heard of before.

In 1932, Pecora led a Congressional commission charged with investigating the market crash of 1929. What he found was nothing short of scandalous.

For instance, in a near mirror image to today, the Pecora commission revealed that National City Bank sold off bad loans to Latin American countries by packing them into securities and selling them to unsuspecting investors. Moreover, the hearings also unearthed evidence that the Wall Street game was largely rigged, benefiting the rich at the expense of ordinary investors.

Sound familiar?

In the aftermath, Ferdinand Pecora published a memoir that recounted details of the investigations entitled: Wall Street Under Oath.

In it Pecora wrote:

"Bitterly hostile was Wall Street to the enactment of the regulatory legislation. Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker's stoutest allies." (emphasis mine).

Eighty years later, those are words that easily could have been written yesterday.

So here is the latest on the move to shine some light into that very darkness.

In short, the ghost of Pecora lives....

From Bloomberg by Mark Pittman and Laura Litvan entitled: Pelosi Wall Street Probe Modeled on Pecora After Market Crash

"Wall Street may be heading for the deepest investigation of its practices since a congressional panel's probe of abuses following the 1929 stock market crash.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to push for a comprehensive inquiry, saying that three-quarters of Americans want to know what led to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the collapse of Bear Stearns Cos. and Merrill Lynch & Co. She favors one patterned after Senate Banking Committee hearings led by Ferdinand Pecora starting in 1933, according to her spokesman, Nadeam Elshami.

The Pecora review "was probably the single most important congressional investigation in the history of our country, except perhaps the Watergate hearings," Donald Ritchie, associate historian for the U.S. Senate, said in an interview.

Congress is reacting to an economic collapse that has generated $1.3 trillion in financial industry losses, $700 billion in U.S. taxpayer cash infusions and loans, and $37 trillion in destroyed world stock market value since 2007. The Pecora Commission generated public support for creating the Securities and Exchange Commission and laws that governed financial services for seven decades.

In citing the Pecora model, advocates of a full-scale probe are harkening back to an investigation that captivated the nation in the 1930s. It centered on an intense examination of bankers and brokers and how their actions helped contribute to the stock market's implosion.

Pecora exposed practices that benefited the wealthy at the expense of ordinary investors, such as giving favored clients insider prices on stock offerings, Ritchie said.

"Stock exchanges were operated as private clubs up to that point," he said, adding that the investigation "brought back to Earth once-Olympian bankers."

The Pecora hearings were steeped in drama — and comedy. In one incident, the publicity-shy financier J.P. Morgan sat alone at the witness table during a break and was surprised when a circus promoter, seeking a chance to use the hearings to get publicity for his show, placed a dwarf in Morgan's lap, Ritchie said. Photos of the awkward moment appeared on front pages across the nation and the shot became a symbol of the humbling of the nation's top bankers."

By the way, as a result of the Pecora Commission's findings, the United States Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933 to separate commercial and investment banking.

Of course, that essential act was effectively repealed by Congress in 1999. Ending it set the stage for what haunts us today. Financial mega-firms like Citigroup couldn't have existed without it.

History is fascinating. It's too bad we never learn from it.

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