Private Finance, Public Power

"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"--