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

The strange and contested evolution of the management of banking risk

Banks 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.

Author: Peter Conti-Brown, Sean H. Vanatta
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 06/24/2025
Pages: 424
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780691232829

About the Author
Peter Conti-Brown is the Class of 1965 Associate Professor of Financial Regulation at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a nonresident fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve and the coauthor of The Law of Financial Institutions. Sean H. Vanatta is senior lecturer in financial history and policy at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control.