Emergency Banking Act/ FDIC

In Franklin Roosevelt's first actual day as President, he signed the Emergency Banking Act, which saved the entire United States' (and possibly the worlds') banking system from entire collapse. It mainly was comprised of a so-called "Bank Holiday", in which all US banks closed for four days and went under major scrutiny to determine whether the banks were solvent enough to reopen. As the below table shows almost 4,000 banks closed during the peak of the Great Depression in 1933 and bank users lost almost $550,000 collectively.

Table 3-1. Commercial Bank Suspensions, 1921-1933 ($ Thousands)
Year	Number of Suspensions (1)	Deposits (2)	Losses Borne by Depositors (3)	Losses to Depositors As a Percent of Deposits in All Commercial Banks (4)
1921	506	$172,806	$59,967	0.21%
1922	366	91,182	38,223	0.13
1923	646	149.601	62,142	0.19
1924	775	210,150	79,381	0.23
1925	617	166,937	60,799	0.16
1926	975	260,153	83,066	0.21
1927	669	199,332	60.681	0.15
1928	498	142,386	43,813	0.10
1929	659	230,643	76.659	0.18
1930	1,350	837,096	237,359	0,57
1931	2,293	1, 690,232	390,476	1.01
1932	1,453	706,187	168,302	0.57
1933	4,000	3,596,708	540,396	2.15
Source: http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/firstfifty/chapter3.html

 Furthermore, to not only combat banks closing, the 1933 Banking Act included a the formation of a new government corporation called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or FDIC. The FDIC certified citizens trust in the banking system by backing up citizens’ deposits which made sure that if a bank went under, investments would be backed up regardless.These two acts passed in less than 8 hours of debate in Congress and proved to be the silver bullet to fix the Banking System. Two weeks after the Bank Holiday, the American public had “already invested more than half of its money back into the banking system”(Silber 19).


Sources:
William Silber's article " Why Did FDR's Bank Holiday Succeed?"
FDIC First 50 Years
Emergency Banking Act Full Text