America in Crisis: Banking Collapse, Unemployment, and the Dust Bowl

Between 1930 and 1933 the United States was hit by repeated waves of bank runs, and because no deposit-insurance system yet existed, thousands of failed local banks simply erased their depositors' savings; a particularly notorious failure was the Bank of United States in New York, which collapsed in December 1930, and Austria's Creditanstalt failure in 1931 triggered a parallel collapse in the German banking system. The crisis peaked in March 1933, when newly inaugurated President Roosevelt declared a nationwide 'Bank Holiday,' followed swiftly by the Emergency Banking Act; out of this crisis came the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), created later in 1933 to insure deposits, and the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking.