Over on the home page, Duncan Currie looks at the Volcker rule, the “proposal to outlaw or restrict ‘proprietary trading’ (trading for profit) by commercial banks and bank holding companies.” The Volcker rule, he reports, remains a “major point of contention” as “congressional negotiators seek to merge two gigantic-financial regulation bills.” How will the Volcker rule play out in the Senate? Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) tells National Review Online that instead of debating how the Volcker rule fits, “we ought to go ahead and reinstitute Glass-Steagall,” the 1933 law that separated commercial banking from investment banking and was partially repealed in 1999. “That would be the easiest thing to do,” he says. He worries that “we’re assembling a regulatory architecture that potentially stands a chance of one, being dysfunctional, and two, being extremely costly.” Speaking of finance, Burr has some advice for President Obama as he prepares for this week’s G-20 summit in Toronto. “You’ve got Japan on the brink of falling into the abyss and the European Union in a much more serious position than anyone wants to admit,” he says. “Then I look at the U.S., and we probably owe 50 percent of the entire sovereign debt of the European Union, about 13 trillion, in interest payments over the next 10 years, just on the money we’ve borrowed. My fear is that we’ll become a tool that people use to stabilize counties and their markets, probably via the International Monetary Fund or some other entity. Yet we’re in as bad shape as they are . . . Who’s going to pull the global economy out of this? For our economy to come back, we have to fuel it domestically or internationally. I don’t see the international help coming, with Europe in straits and Asia, to a large degree in the same situation. China is not going through this without debt, either . . . the decisions we make over the next two years will really dictate our health for generations.”