In March 2008 there were five giant Wall Street investment banks, banks which underwrote Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), corporate bonds, corporate stock issues. They were not deposit banks like Citibank or Bank of America; they were known as investment banksMorgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns.
The business of taking deposits and lending by banks had been split during the Great Depression from the business of underwriting and selling stocks and bondsinvestment bankingby an act of Congress, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The law was passed amid the collapse of the banking system in the United States following the bursting of the Wall Street stock market bubble in October 1929.
That Glass-Steagall act was a prudent attempt by Congress to end the uncontrolled speculative excesses of the Roaring Twenties by New York finance. It established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to guarantee personal bank deposits to a fixed sum that restored consumer confidence and ended the panic runs on bank deposits.
The repeal allowed commercial banks such as Citigroup, then the largest US bank, to underwrite and trade new financial instruments such as Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and establish so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities. Repeal of Glass-Steagall after 1999, in short, enabled the Securitization revolution so openly praised by Greenspan as the revolution in finance. That revolution is today devouring its young.
That securitization process is at the heart of the present Financial Tsunami that is destroying the American credit structure.