Banks engaged in plenty of activities beyond “traditional” banking before Glass-Steagall was repealed, and there is little evidence of a surge afterwards, according to a blog post published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Nicola Cetorelli digs into historical data on US banks in an effort to find out the extent to which they were “boring” while Glass-Steagall was in place, in the sense of mainly engaging in traditional banking. He finds the act did little to prevent banks from