What 'Bring Back Glass-Steagall' Means to Left and Right

If I were a betting man, I’d give odds that Senator Elizabeth Warren, the liberal firebrand from Massachusetts, and Gary Cohn, the ex-president of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. now serving as the President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, have very different ideas about what it means to “bring back Glass-Steagall.”

On Wednesday, Bloomberg’s Elizabeth Dexheimer broke the story that during a closed-door meeting, Warren, a fierce critic of the big banks, asked Cohn for his thoughts on Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law separating commercial banking from investment banking that was repealed in 1999. According to Dexheimer, Cohn replied that he “generally favors banking going back to how it was when firms like Goldman focused on trading and underwriting securities, and companies such as Citigroup Inc. primarily issued loans.”