Now governments on both sides of the Atlantic are backtracking and attempting to go back to the time when these two types of banking operations were separate. In American the Dodd-Frank act of 2010 is a wide ranging piece of financial legislation which includes something called the Volcker Rule, which forces banks to separate their retail and investment arms. In the UK the Vickers Report attempts to do the same thing, though it does not come into effect until 2019. Critics of both the Vickers report and the Volcker Rule argue that, under pressure from the banks, both pieces of legislation have been watered down (for example by being vague about what constitutes high-risk and low-risk investing, and giving the banks considerable leeway on how ‘separate’ these activities should be) and therefore the possibility of another financial crisis has not been averted.
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