The Glass-Steagall Act was one of the most famous acts of congress in 1933. It did a number of things, notably it created the federal deposit insurance corporation which was the first insurance of commercial bank deposits in the United States. So the idea of an investment bank was really created of a separate investment bank was created by Glass-Steagall. So the problem was that people thought that the crash of 1929 had something to do with banks. And investment banking and commercial banking being in one operation and rip offs, there were rip offs. So if a bank was both an investment bank and also a commercial bank, then the investment bank could use the knowledge from the commercial bank to do insider trading of securities. Which somehow, was connected back then to the 1929 stock market crash. The really important thing that's most remembered about the Glass-Steagall act is it said that you can't be both an investment bank and a commercial bank. So that's why we have Morgan Stanley. Now it's changed since then but why Morgan Stanley separated from JP Morgan, also why First Boston Corporation Separated from the Boston National Bank, I think it was called, in 1934. It was because of the Glass Steagall Act but that was repealed. By the way, other countries didn't do this. So United States had a complete separation of commercial banking and investment banking. But other countries allowed what we call universal banking throughout this whole period. So over the years, these investment banks and commercial banks complained that they couldn't compete with European. Or having trouble competing, because they couldn't offer all the services that were seamlessly offered by European banks. And so because of lobbying by banks, regulators nibbled away at Glass-Steagall and were beginning to allow commercial banks to get involved in certain investment banking operations. And then the Gramm-Leach Act of 1999 which signed by President Clinton, finally ended Glass Steagall. So they can now do both. You can be both a commercial bank and an investment bank. And that led to a wave of mergers of commercial banks and investment banks, and insurance companies which had also been kept separate. So there's some Traveler's Group in Citicorp Merged. Chase Manhattan Bank acquired JP Morgan so it's now called JP Morgan Chase. And UBS Switzerland bought Paine Webber. Credit Suisse bought Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, that's all after. But now there are still people who want the Glass Steagall back. One of them is Paul Volcker, the former Fed Chairman, who is actually the most famous Fed chairmen of all because he really whipped inflation. There was out of control inflation, and when he became Fed chairman in 1979, he created a recession, actually, a worldwide recession, and he lobbied among other central bankers. We can't just keep feeding inflation. And it's going to have some cost. So the cost, the so-called Great Recession, among the recessions so called in 19 well, there were two of them in 1981 and 82. Which was the severe recession. But he seemed to break rising inflation. So he wanted to put Glass-Stegall back with the Dodd Frank act and instead managed only to put in something called the Volcker rule. The Volcker rule is that commercial banks cannot invest can not do proprietary trading. They can do investment banking but they cannot directly own hedge funds or other risky investments. So, commercial banks are allowed to underwrite securities and do the normal activities associated with underwriting of securities but they can't be just buying for their own account, risky assets.
