Glass-Steagall signed
The Banking Act of 1933 separated commercial deposit-taking banks from investment banks. Passed in the aftermath of over 4,000 US bank failures between 1929 and 1933. The separation lasted 66 years. Its repeal in 1999 is widely identified as a structural precondition for the 2008 crisis, which this chart records two eras later.
Glass-Steagall was sponsored by two Democrats (Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry Steagall) and signed by a third (FDR). All three had personal stakes in the post-1929 banking crisis. Glass had helped design the Federal Reserve in 1913. Steagall was from Alabama and had watched hundreds of rural banks collapse in his district.
04 · The Great Depression
The Dow peaked at 381 in September 1929. It bottomed at 41 in July 1932 — a decline of 89% over 34 months. Recovery to the 1929 peak took until 1954. Margin lending wiped out the middle class. Unemployment reached 25%. One in four US banks failed. The New Deal, modern securities law, the FDIC, and most of the 20th century's economic institutions exist because of this crash.
Read the full era →