 In November 1910 the five heads of the country's most powerful finance sector firms gathered for a secret meeting on Jekyll Island with U.S.Senator Nelson W. Aldrich and Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department A. Piatt Andrew and laid the plans for the U.S. Federal Reserve System.In the 1970s, the financial sector comprised slightly more than 3% of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP] of the U.S. economy, while total financial assets of all investment banks (that is, securities broker-dealers) made up less than 2% of U.S. GDP.