Glass–Steagall Act - Name Confusion: 1932 and 1933 Glass–Steagall Acts

Name Confusion: 1932 and 1933 Glass–Steagall Acts

Two separate United States laws are known as the Glass–Steagall Act. Both bills were sponsored by Democratic Senator Carter Glass of Lynchburg, Virginia, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and Democratic Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency.

The Glass–Steagall Act of 1932 authorized Federal Reserve Banks to (1) lend to five or more Federal Reserve System member banks on a group basis or to any individual member bank with capital stock of $5 million or less against any satisfactory collateral, not only “eligible paper,” and (2) issue Federal Reserve Bank Notes (i.e., paper currency) backed by US government securities when a shortage of “eligible paper” held by Federal Reserve banks would have required such currency to be backed by gold. The Federal Reserve Board explained that the special lending to Federal Reserve member banks permitted by the 1932 Glass–Steagall Act would only be permitted in “unusual and temporary circumstances.”

The entire Banking Act of 1933 (the 1933 Banking Act), which is described in a separate article, is also often referred to as the Glass–Steagall Act. Over time, however, the term Glass–Steagall Act came to be used most often to refer to four provisions of the 1933 Banking Act that separated commercial banking from investment banking. Congressional efforts to “repeal the Glass–Steagall Act” referred to those four provisions (and then usually to only the two provisions that restricted affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms). Those efforts culminated in the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), which repealed the two provisions restricting affiliations between banks and securities firms.