“The Glass-Steagall Act is the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking. It was functionally repealed in 1998, when Travelers (the parent company of Salomon Smith Barney) acquired Citicorp. And it was officially repealed in 1999. But recent events on Wall Street — the failure or sale of three of the five largest independent investment banks — have effectively turned back the clock to the 1920s, when investment banks and commercial banks cohabited under the same corporate umbrella.” As Wall Street takes a dive in the wake of several bank failures and near-failures — but, don’t worry, the fundamentals of the economy are strong and everything — Newsweek‘s Daniel Gross briefly discusses the end of the Glass-Steagal era, and what it means for the American economy.