NationsBank-BankAmerica $62 Billion Merger Creates First Coast-to-Coast National Bank

NationsBank completes its $62 billion acquisition of BankAmerica Corporation, creating the first truly coast-to-coast national bank in U.S. history and taking the Bank of America name. The merger occurs just one year before the formal repeal of Glass-Steagall, demonstrating how banking consolidation was already accelerating in anticipation of deregulation.

The Justice Department approves the merger after requiring $491.6 million in divestitures in New Mexico, where the combined entity would have dominated the market. Despite this antitrust action, the merger represents a massive concentration of banking power - the combined institution controls assets across the entire United States, creating the kind of “too big to fail” institution that Depression-era banking regulation had sought to prevent.

The NationsBank-BankAmerica merger exemplifies the wave of bank consolidation that intensified in the late 1990s as Glass-Steagall’s formal repeal approached. During this period, independent investment banks were systematically acquired by large commercial banks, and interstate banking restrictions were effectively abandoned. The 1999 Glass-Steagall repeal would accelerate this trend, enabling further mega-mergers that created institutions like the modern JPMorgan Chase. These consolidations concentrated financial power, created systemic risk through institutions deemed too large to fail, and reduced competition in banking markets - consequences that would become catastrophically apparent during the 2008 financial crisis when taxpayers were forced to bail out the very institutions that deregulation had enabled.