The irony of the 1999 banking reform is that its repeal of Glass-Steagall prohibitions on risky bank investments did NOT blow us up. They might have, given time. But they didn't.
It was Gingrich's entirely new retaliatory provision blocking Treasury's regulatory bureau (the Civil-War era OCC) from supervising activity in bank holding company subsidiaries technically outside their banks. That's where national banks moved their mortgage lending after 1999. It wasn't long until we had jumbo mortgages and strange mortgage-backed securities.
Gingrich hoped the change would give Congress more control over banks since the Fed regulates bank holding companies and Congress controls the Fed. But whereas the OCC has 3,000 feisty supervisors getting in bank managers' faces every day, the Fed relies more on cocktail conversations with bank CEOs.
The U.S. mortgage lending industry was taken outside active supervision for the first time in 1999 in a fit of anger over House Republicans' doomed impeachment effort. It took eight years for those chickens to come home to roost.