We sent New York Times columnist Joe Nocera back in time, and we want to do the same for you.
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In his column Saturday, Nocera looked back at the debate leading up to the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933. Nocera wasn't relying on some secondary-source history book you can buy on Amazon; he got his hands dirty with news articles from 1933 that we culled, at his request, from American Banker's archives. That's how he found nuggets like a scene at the Waldorf-Astoria, six months before Glass-Steagall was passed, where the president of the American Bankers Association bemoaned that the bill "would destroy a substantial part of our bond-distributing machinery."
You, too, can journey to the industry's past. First, visit our Flashback site at AmericanBanker.com/175. There you'll find historic articles on everything from bank failures in the nineteenth century (with no FDIC, banks could close any time of the day, any day of the week, not just Friday nights, and depositors were lucky to get 75 cents on the dollar) to the Bretton Woods monetary conference to Richard Nixon's ban on mailing unsolicited credit cards.
Some stories seem uncannily familiar, like a 1909 op-ed calling for "country banks" to be regulated differently than big banks. Substitute the word "community" for "country" and it sounds a lot like an argument that our editor-at-large, Barbara A. Rehm, made in a recent column more than a century later.
We created the Flashback site to help commemorate American Banker's 175th anniversary this year. We'll be posting a new Flashback every business day over the next few months, so be sure to check back regularly.
Can't find the landmark event you're looking for? Let us know. What seminal banking stories from the last 175 years would you like to see our coverage of? Leave a comment below and we'll wind up the time machine (ok, it's actually a microfiche reader, but same difference). Like any 175-year-old, we have a few gaps in our memory banks, particularly from the 19th century. But if it changed the industry, chances are it's in the vault.
