The Glass-Steagall banking Act of 1933, the Securities Act of 1933 or the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 were perhaps the most powerful and important financial laws ever created in the United States.

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Congress passed historic banking regulations during the New Deal, including the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, the Securities Act of 1933, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, all of which vastly expanded the role of the federal government in overseeing and regulating Wall Street.

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To prevent it from ever happening again, in 1933 Congress passed the Banking Act of 1933, better known as the Glass-Steagall Act.

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After the Wall Street crash of 1929, it took four years before Congress passed the Glass-Steagall act, which split commercial banking from securities dealing. (Before the legislation bank deposits were frequently diverted in support of new issues by commercial bankers' investment-banking colleagues.) Other restrictive rules continued to be made until 1940.

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Yet despite some talk about the need for a new Glass-Steagall act to separate retail and investment banking, and for higher capital charges based on size, the idea of breaking up institutions does not have great momentum.

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Whereas, the Glass-Steagall Act unfairly limited them to retail and commercial banking.

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Merrill was one of the leading campaigners for the abolition of the Glass-Steagall act that kept investment banks out of commercial banking.

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In America, which banned universal banking after the Great Depression under the Glass-Steagall act, the division between the two kinds was incrementally weakened for decades, before it was finally scrapped in 1999.

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Politicians such as Phil Gramm, formerly a senator from Texas, sponsored the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, a Depression-era separation of investment and retail banking.

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Sanford Weill built Citi into a too-big-to-fail institution by steamrolling over the last remnants of the Glass-Steagall Act that previously had separated the deposits-and-loans business from riskier activities like investment banking and underwriting stocks.

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