Both names are misnomers. No one seriously wants to reenact the Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed in 1999. What is being called the Volcker plan is not his plan, but an administration-backed variant that he has been persuaded to endorse.
The Glass-Steagall Act was a Great Depression measure that beefed up federal regulation of banking in a variety of ways. The best known was the separation of commercial banking from investment banking. What this meant was that commercial banks could no longer underwrite new issues of securities and engage in other common investment banking activities. So the Morgan bank had to split into two pieces, Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, and a commercial bank now known as JPMorgan Chase & Co. Over the decades the restrictions that the act imposed on banks were gradually relaxed, to the point where even before the formal repeal of Glass-Steagall, commercial banks were permitted to engage in securities underwriting and a variety of other noncommercial banking activities.
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