12 November 1999: Glass-Steagall's wall comes down
President Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, repealing key parts of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that had separated commercial banking from investment banking and insurance. The change effectively blessed the 1998 merger that created Citigroup. Supporters said it modernized finance; critics later argued it helped create banks too big and complex to fail. The debate still flares every time a bank needs rescuing.
The lesson: Rules written after a crisis tend to be forgotten just before the next one.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Citigroup at the start of 2000 → $213 today, vs $4,626 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2000, the first year in our price data after the event. That is a loss of $787, while a plain index fund over the same years made $3,626.
What Citigroup teaches: When a stock falls more than 90 percent, it must rise more than tenfold just to get back to even; some losses are effectively permanent.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $470 | $213 | $4,626 |
| 2003 | $350 | $286 | $7,727 |
| 2005 | $480 | $208 | $5,763 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Citigroup? Every starting year and the full story →
More Citigroup history
- 6 April 1998: Citicorp and Travelers announce the merger that made Citigroup
- 4 November 2007: Citigroup's Chuck Prince steps down
- 23 November 2008: The government throws Citigroup a lifeline
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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