Private Finance, Public Power : A History of Bank Supervision in America / Peter Conti-Brown, Sean H. Vanatta.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Conti-Brown, Peter, 1981- author.

Vanatta, Sean H., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Banks and banking--State supervision--United States--History.

Banks and banking.

Banking law--United States--History.

Banking law.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (425 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2025.

Summary:

"The strange and contested evolution of the management of banking riskBanks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public plays a key role in deciding what risks are taken as well as how, when, and to what end. Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management. In Private Finance, Public Power, Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta offer a new history of finance and public policy in the United States by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide. Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Conti-Brown and Vanatta describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.Conti-Brown and Vanatta trace the different supervisory frameworks that evolved over time, from the imposition of private liability on bank shareholders to the development of the central bank to the creation of federal deposit insurance. Negotiations took place at federal and state levels, but, over time, the federal government assumed most of the responsibility for managing financial risk. Moreover, federal supervisory officials began to undertake more varied tasks, including monitoring racial discrimination and managing financial concentration. Conti-Brown and Vanatta introduce a diverse cast of characters-bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others-and show how they navigated two hundred years of financial panics, scandals, and crises to build the system that structures modern America's banking system"-- Provided by publisher.

"How regulating the banks became a separate and strange category of government power. Banks are unlike most other businesses, and over centuries, regulating banks has become a category of government power all its own. For some, the appropriate role of those supervising the banks approximates cops on the beat patrolling for crime; for others they should be more like fire wardens responding to emergencies. In real life they are compliance officers and auditors, risk managers and crisis responders, the bane of international drug cartels, and the friends of bank CEOs. The mandate of "supervising the banks" is not regulation and it is not the implementation of regulation. Rather, it is a fundamentally different way that the government exercises power over, and sometimes with, markets and society. The Banker's Thumb tells the history of this unusual form of public power. It argues that bank supervision is the "institutionalization of discretion" exercised by government actors over private banks and, eventually, the financial system as a whole. Authors Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta show how this supervision developed in fits and starts from roots in state law to become a residual category into which Congress has tossed a hodgepodge of distinct and at times conflicting paradigms of power, across a growing group of organizations engaged in interminable conflict. Understanding what this system is, where it came from, and how political actors and financial market participants engage with it can help organize the growing field of financial regulation. Conti-Brown and Vanatta also show how the history of bank supervision expands and sometimes challenges prevailing historical conceptions of state power and its many twists and turns through the 19th and 20th centuries, which can inform broader discussions about politics, law, finance, and the development of state and administrative capacity in the United States"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

Introduction

1. Origins: The Early Republic and the Free Banking Era

Interlude: Supervision on Suspicion

2. The Rise and Retreat of Supervisory Discretion: Implementing the National Banking Acts in the 1860s

Interlude: The Freedman's Bank

3. Competition and Crisis in the Gilded Age

Interlude: O. Henry and J.F.C. Nettlewick

4. Central Banking and Bank Supervision: Complements and Alternatives in the Founding of the Federal Reserve

Interlude: Sioux Falls Falls

5. The 1933 Bank Holiday and the Legitimacy of Supervision

Interlude: Banking on Bonds, for Better and Worse

6. Supervision's New Deal: The Competitive Institutionalization of the 1930s

Interlude: Supervising Japanese Banking

7. Supervising Concentration: Holding Companies and Merger Review in the Postwar Years

Interlude: Training Examiners (and Bankers) in the 1950s

8. The Saxon Invasion: The Supervisory Battle over Risk and Failure in the 1960s

Interlude: Bunco

9. The Expansion of Residual Risk: Bank Supervision for Antidiscrimination, Consumer Protection, and Community Reinvestment

Conclusion: To What End, the Public Control of Private Finance

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-691-23346-2

OCLC:

1515462460