Investment Company Institute v. Camp/Dissent Blackmun

by Harry Blackmun

United States Supreme Court

401 U.S. 617

Investment Company Institute  v.  Camp

 Argued: Dec. 14 and 15, 1970. --- Decided: April 5, 1971

Mr. Justice BLACKMUN, dissenting.

The Court's opinion and judgments here, it seems to me, are based more on what is deemed to be appropriate and desirable national banking policy than on what is a necessary judicial construction of the Glass-Steagall Act of almost four decades ago. It is a far different thing to be persuaded that it is wise policy to keep national banks out of the business of operating mutual investment funds, despite the safeguards that the Comptroller of the Currency and the Securities and Exchange Commission have provided, than it is to be persuaded that existing and somewhat ancient legislation requires that result. Policy considerations are for the Congress and not for this Court.

I recognize and am fully aware of the factors and of the economic considerations that led to the enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act. The second and third decades of this century are not the happiest chapter in the history of American banking. Deep national concerns emerged from the distressful experiences of those years and from the sad ends to which certain banking practices of that time had led the industry. But those then-prevailing conditions, the legislative history, and the remedy Congress provided, prompt me to conclude that what was proscribed was the involvement and activity of a national bank in investment, as contrasted with commercial, banking, in underwriting and issuing, and in acquiring speculative securities for its own account. These were the banking sins of that time.

The propriety, however, of a national bank's acting, when not in contravention of state or local law, as an inter vivos or testamentary trustee, as an executor or administrator, as a guardian or committee, as a custodian and, indeed, as an agent for the individual customer's securities and funds, see Carcaba v. McNair, 68 F.2d 795, 797 (CA5 1934), cert. denied, 292 U.S. 646, 54 S.Ct. 780, 78 L.Ed. 1497, is not, and could not be, questioned by the petitioners here or by the Court. This being so, there is, for me, an element of illogic in the ready admission by all concerned, on the one hand, that a national bank has the power to manage, by way of a common trust arrangement, those funds that it holds as fiduciary in the technical sense, and to administer separate agency accounts, and in the rejection, on the other hand, of the propriety of the bank's placing agency assets into a mutual investment fund. The Court draws its decisional line between the two. I find it impossible to locate any statutory root for that line drawing. To use the Glass-Steagall Act as a tool for that distinction is, I think, a fundamental misconception of the statute.

Accordingly, I am not convinced that the Congress, by that Act or otherwise, as yet has proscribed the banking endeavors under challenge here by competitors in a highly competitive field. None of the judges of the Court of Appeals was so convinced, and neither was the Comptroller of the Currency whose expertise the Court concedes. I would leave to Congress the privilege of now prohibiting such national bank activity if that is its intent and desire.

In Parts IV and V of its opinion the Court outlines hazards that are present when a bank indulges in specified activities. The Court then states, in the last paragraph of Part V, that those hazards are not present when a bank undertakes to purchase stock for individual customers or to commingle assets held in its several fiduciary capacities, and the like. I must disagree. It seems to me that exactly the same hazards are indeed present. A bank offers its fiduciary services in an atmosphere of vigorous competition. One need only observe the current and continuous advertising of claimed fiduciary skills to know that this is so and that the business is one for profit. In the fiduciary area a bank is engaged in direct competition with other investment concepts and with non-banking fiduciaries. Failure or misadventure of a single trust may constitute a threat to public confidence among the bank's other trust beneficiaries, prospective trustors, and even the commercial activities of the bank itself. It has an inevitable adverse effect upon the bank's fulfillment of what is fashionably described today as its 'full service.' Thus I feel that the Court overstates its case when it seeks to diminish the significance of these hazards in the fiduciary area as contrasted with mutual fund operation. After all, we deal here with something akin to the traditional banking function and with a device that makes available for the small investor what is already available for the large investor by way of the individual agency account.

What the Court decries in the investment fund is the combination of three banking operations, each concededly permissible: acting as agent for the customer, purchasing for that customer, and pooling assets. It is said that 'the union of these powers' gives birth to something 'of a different character' and is statutorily prohibited. I doubt that those three powers, each allowed by the controlling statutes, somehow operate in combination to produce something forbidden by those same controlling statutes, and I doubt that the unitization is something more than or something different from the mere sum of its parts and that it thereby expands to achieve offensiveness under the Glass-Steagall Act.

With my position as to the Act only a minority one, detailed discussion of the additional issue, raised in No. 59, as to the propriety of the exemption granted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, would be superfluous. Suffice it to say that I am in accord with the views expressed in the respective opinions on this issue in the Court of Appeals, 136 U.S.App.D.C. 241, 249-253, 266, 420 F.2d 83, 91-95, and 108, and, in particular, by Chief Judge Bazelon when he carefully examined the four 'danger zones' considered by the SEC and the protections erected against them, and then concurred in the Commission's exercise of judgment. I, too, feel that the Commission did not act arbitrarily or exceed its statutory authority and that its determination deserves support here.

I would affirm the judgments of the Court of Appeals.

Notes