Commercial banks are divided by legal status into a) national and b) state banks. The former operate under federal law and are necessarily members of the Federal Reserve System as member banks; the latter operate under the laws of individual states and may or may not be members of the Federal Reserve.

Out of all commercial banks, a few of the largest banks, whose resources are growing faster than the sum of the resources of other banks, have been singled out. In turn, a handful of giant banks have emerged from the largest commercial banks – Bank of America, First Nation City Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan Bank, Menifexchurer’s Hanover Trust Co. and Morgan Guarantee Trust KV. These banks either lead or play a major role in powerful financial-industrial groups. They are essentially bank holding companies formed by merging large banks.

At the end of 1994, there were 40.9 thousand commercial banks with total assets of 4,313 billion dollars, as well as 9.3 thousand full-time banks – members of the Federal Reserve and 24.5 thousand full-time banks not members of the Federal Reserve.

In the resources of U.S. commercial banks, equity accounts for a small part, up to 7.4 percent; deposits account for the lion’s share, with 44 percent being demand deposits and 56 percent term deposits.

The commercial banks’ active operations consisted overwhelmingly of loans (in 1995, loans accounted for 56% of total assets). Investments occupy a smaller place, and they consist largely of investments in government securities, mainly federal securities.

Note that the Banking Act of 1933 prohibited commercial banks from acquiring shares in industrial and commercial companies. However, this does not mean the elimination of the splicing of banks with industrial companies. A typical form of this splicing is the incorporation of major banks and industrial companies into the same financial-industrial groups. The close ties of large commercial banks with industry are carried out through long-term loans. Large commercial banks provide about 3/4 of all “commercial and industrial” loans; loans with a maturity of more than one year play an important role, some of them for long terms of up to 8-10 years and are a typical form of alliance between banks and industrial and commercial companies.

Fiduciary operations play an important role in the splicing of large American banks with industry and other companies. Commercial banks are deprived of the right to buy shares of industrial and commercial companies on their own account, but they have the right to manage the assets of those companies by proxy of their clients; the latter often entrust the banks with the right to vote at general meetings of shareholders. In fact, this is a peculiar form of circumventing the ban on commercial banks owning shares in companies.