Excerpt from The Romance and Tragedy of Banking: Problems and Incidents of Governmental Supervision of National Banks Some years ago at a banquet given by the Bankers' Association of the District of Columbia, I sat next to an eminent jurist of the District Bar. During the course of the evening our conversation drifted to the subject of the Currency Bureau and its management, and after relating to him some of the difficulties and situations which frequently confront the Comptroller of the Currency in his supervision of the national banks, he remarked that there must have come to my knowledge during my long connection with the service many incidents similar to those related which would make a very interesting narrative if assembled in book form. This suggestion, therefore, is responsible for the publication of this volume, and is my apology for writing it. It is not an essay on banking and currency, nor a discussion of financial or economic theories. It is simply a narrative of events of more or less importance and interest in the history of the National Currency Bureau with some original deductions and comments. It contains many unvarnished truths, plainly told, with no attempt at literary excellence. It deals with men and measures, methods and motives in connection with the administration of the bureau, with no intention of contrasting one administration with another or of drawing invidious distinctions between them. It endeavors to right some wrongs where injustice has been done and to correct some erroneous impressions as to the powers and duties of the Comptroller of the Currency. In May, 1886, I was tendered and accepted the position of Secretary to the Comptroller of the Currency, by William L. Trenholm, of South Carolina, who a month previously had been appointed Comptroller. I was sworn in and entered upon the discharge of my duties May 16, 1886. Thus began a period of service in the Bureau of the Currency, which continued uninterruptedly for more than thirty-six years, undisturbed by political or other changes in Federal, departmental or bureau administration. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Banks were allowed to enter securities markets and become universal banks during two periods in the past century - the 1920s and the late 1990s. Both times, universal banks made high-risk loans and packaged them into securities that were sold as safe investments to poorly-informed investors. Both times, universal banks promoted unsustainable booms that led to destructive busts - the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09. Both times, governments were forced to arrange costly bailouts of universal banks. Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 in response to the Great Depression. The Act broke up universal banks and established a decentralized financial system composed of three separate and independent sectors: banking, securities, and insurance. That system was stable and successful for over four decades until the big-bank lobby persuaded regulators to open loopholes in Glass-Steagall during the 1980s and convinced Congress to repeal it in 1999. Congress did not adopt a new Glass-Steagall Act after the Global Financial Crisis. Instead, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act. Dodd-Frank's highly technical reforms tried to make banks safer but left in place a dangerous financial system dominated by universal banks. Universal banks continue to pose unacceptable risks to financial stability and economic and social welfare. They exert far too much influence over our political and regulatory systems because of their immense size and their undeniable "too-big-to-fail" status. In Taming the Megabanks, Arthur Wilmarth argues that we must again separate banks from securities markets to avoid another devastating financial crisis and ensure that our financial system serves Main Street business firms and consumers instead of Wall Street bankers and speculators. Wilmarth's comprehensive and detailed analysis demonstrates that a new Glass-Steagall Act would make our financial system much more stable and less likely to produce boom-and-bust cycles. Giant universal banks would no longer dominate our financial system or receive enormous subsidies. A more decentralized and competitive financial system would encourage banks and securities firms to fulfill their proper roles as servants - not masters - of Main Street businesses and consumers.

An examination of how political issues influence public finance.

It is widely believed that central banks have grown (the Bank of England) or were established (the Federal Reserve) to pursue the twin objectives of monetary and price stability. But why should they? Central bankers are people, too, whose behavior is presumably determined, like the rest of us, by their incentives and the information available to them. The author explores this question.

Originally written for a conference of the Federal Reserve, Gary Gorton's "The Panic of 2007" garnered enormous attention and is considered by many to be the most convincing take on the recent economic meltdown. Now, in Slapped by the Invisible Hand, Gorton builds upon this seminal work, explaining how the securitized-banking system, the nexus of financial markets and instruments unknown to most people, stands at the heart of the financial crisis. Gorton shows that the Panic of 2007 was not so different from the Panics of 1907 or of 1893, except that, in 2007, most people had never heard of the markets that were involved, didn't know how they worked, or what their purposes were. Terms like subprime mortgage, asset-backed commercial paper conduit, structured investment vehicle, credit derivative, securitization, or repo market were meaningless. In this superb volume, Gorton makes all of this crystal clear. He shows that the securitized banking system is, in fact, a real banking system, allowing institutional investors and firms to make enormous, short-term deposits. But as any banking system, it was vulnerable to a panic. Indeed the events starting in August 2007 can best be understood not as a retail panic involving individuals, but as a wholesale panic involving institutions, where large financial firms "ran" on other financial firms, making the system insolvent. An authority on banking panics, Gorton is the ideal person to explain the financial calamity of 2007. Indeed, as the crisis unfolded, he was working inside an institution that played a central role in the collapse. Thus, this book presents the unparalleled and invaluable perspective of a top scholar who was also a key insider.