Private Finance, Public Power : A History of Bank Supervision in America

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 differe