by Stratfor
Financial Sense
[…] Analysis
After the devastating US stock market crash of 1929, the United States introduced the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 to prevent it from ever happening again. The law separated the activities of retail and investment banks, drawing a hard line between customer deposits and speculative trading activity in the markets. This separation, coupled with the constraints imposed by the Bretton Woods system that emerged after World War II, resulted in a long period uninterrupted by major financial shocks.