The Glass-Steagall Act once prevented such combinations, but recently Congress has eased the restrictions.
Calling for the re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act is the new black on Wall Street.
Mr Obama's proposals appear to be a return to the principles underlying the Glass-Steagall Act.
The result will look more like the 1930s Glass-Steagall act in America than many British bankers had hoped.
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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But talk of a new Glass Steagall Act misses the point: this scandal goes well beyond the risks run with insured deposits.
Whereas, the Glass-Steagall Act unfairly limited them to retail and commercial banking.
Merrill was one of the leading campaigners for the abolition of the Glass-Steagall act that kept investment banks out of commercial banking.
Political propagandists try to argue that the bipartisan repeal of the New Deal era Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 contributed to the financial crisis.
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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.
The demise of the 1935 Glass-Steagall Act last year enabled J.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
For instance, in late 1999, he signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed parts of the Glass-Steagall Act, prohibiting commercial banks from getting into the investment business.
Although the 1933 Glass-Steagall act, which separated investment banks and commercial banks, was repealed in 1999, the universal model is still viewed with suspicion in America.
The lack of a Glass-Steagall Act in Europe has led European banks to wobble under the weight of their underwriting of European government debt and other investment banking challenges.
Just as it was okay to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, and the uptick rule, it will make sense to use the bank rescue fund money for some other purpose.
So huge amounts were spent on lobbying by Wall Street firms, and sure enough the barriers began coming down, with Congress repealing the entire Glass Steagall Act in 1999.
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You may recall he did that in large part during those years by chipping away at the regulatory restraints on banks that were imposed by the Glass Steagall Act of 1933.
The reinstatement of the Glass Steagall Act was debated.
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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.
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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Phil Gramm repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
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The Glass-Steagall Act that contributed to the financial collapse by allowing businesses to grow to the point of systemic interdependence was repealed under Clinton, who campaigned as a liberal against the power of big businesses.
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After all, they say, many of the worst elements of the Glass-Steagall act have been disabled by the courts or by regulators such as the Federal Reserve reinterpreting what commercial banks are allowed to do.
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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Spitzer offered that, "Washington is finally beginning to flex the muscles it should have flexed over a number of years, " but he opposed more severe steps suggested by Claman like reinstituting the Glass-Steagall Act or banning credit-default swaps.
So in 1999, when the impressive 1990s bull market was in full swing, investors hardly noticed when the Glass Steagall Act (which had separated financial institutions since the 1930s to prevent banks from getting into brokerage and trading activities) was repealed.
Unlike in the U.S., where the Glass-Steagall Act severely limits the ability of banks to engage in securities underwriting, European giants such as ABN Amro and Germany's Deutsche Bank can do everything from issue corporate bonds to sit on the board of directors.
That kind of anti-regulatory ideology brought us some of the legislation that fostered the global financial crisis, such as the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act and the passage of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which prohibited some regulation of derivatives such as credit default swaps.
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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