By Chris Skinner via Iris.xyz
I see that Donald Trump is thinking about bringing back Glass-Steagall style laws to the US banks. This would force the banks to separate and break up their operations between their investment bank and the retail and commercial bank structures. It intrigues me that this is being considered 18 years after the law was repealed, but why was it repealed in the first place?
Showing my age, I remember the golden years of the 1990s in banking, when all the European banks were building bancassurance models of integrated insurance and banking systems. One US financier in particular was keen to copy this model: Sanford I. Weill, CEO of Travellers Group.
Sanford, or Sandy as everyone knew him, had built Travellers over a quarter of a century from a small regional subsidiary of CDC to a major US insurance and stock broker through various acquisitions including Salomon Smith Barney, the renowned Wall Street firm that made Michael Lewis’s career as an author when he described the firm’s culture in the best-selling book Liar’s Poker:
Click here to read the full story on Iris.xyz.