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Deregulation
U.S. Bank Deregulation in Historical Perspective | Book Reviews
Published by EH.NET (February 2002)
Charles W. Calomiris, U.S. Bank Deregulation in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xxxii + 359 pp. $45 (cloth), ISBN: 0-521-58362-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET by John A. James, Department of Economics, University of Virginia.
This book is a selection of Charles Calomiris's extensive writings on American banking and financial history from over the past decade prefaced by a new introduction, which argues for the relevance of such historical studies to current policy debates on the nature and extent of financial deregulation. This is a useful distillation and compendium, pulling together papers most of which had originally appeared in various conference volumes, some of which may have been missed by less intrepid readers. There's an impressive array of theory and fact on display here, offering some things new to every reader. I've already supplemented my lectures with some of the examples cited here. And it definitely is not wishy-washy.
If these were the sports pages, Calomiris would undoubtedly be described as a player who can do it all -- an active participant in contemporary policy debates with extensive knowledge of the intricacies of current and pending financial legislation, while at the same time a scholar, well versed in political economy, arcane and abstruse finance theory, as well as, of course, financial history. Readers who cannot do it all consequently might find one part or another of the book tough going. Your correspondent, although a regular reader of the Washington Post, for example, found parts of the current legislative review in the Introduction rather sticky. So some sections may be a stretch, but worth it.
Calomiris offers the yin to Richard Sylla's yang, feel-good interpretation of U.S. banking and financial history. While Sylla focuses on the remarkable breadth and depth of the financial system of the early republic, due primarily to Alexander Hamilton's almost single-handed efforts, Calomiris concentrates here on the later and darker side. He weighs the late nineteenth and early twentieth century banking system and finds it suboptimal, both in terms of stability and as a promoter of economic growth.
The basic problem in a word, or two, was unit banking. In the antebellum U.S., interstate branch banking had been practiced by the Banks of the United States, and intrastate branch banking was well established - primarily, albeit not exclusively, in the South. After the demise of the second Bank of the United States however, interstate branching was dead. And by the end of the Civil War even intrastate branching was effectively gone with the wind everywhere. Unit banking had been ensconced by the National Banking Act, and state banking systems generally followed suit until into the twentieth century.
This unit banking structure and consequent geographical fragmentation of the industry was primarily responsible for the recurrent financial panics in nineteenth-century America (Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, written with Gary Gorton). It underlay the ultimate passage of a federal deposit insurance law which was not necessary and which responsible bankers and legislators had long resisted (Chapter 3, written with Eugene White). It precluded, in concert with other legal restrictions, the development of universal banking, in which banks could offer a full range of services including securities underwriting and long-term lending, in the United States as had been so successfully practiced in Germany. This in turn increased the cost of capital significantly to American firms during the Second Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century (Chapters 4-6). Those of a more optimistic nature, following Habakkuk, might think that at times restrictions can ultimately be stimulating, resulting in the development of new and more efficient forms of organization, such as investment banking, for example. But not here according to Calomiris. Investment banking alone couldn't do the job. Capital-output ratios were much higher in Germany than in the U.S., although it would be nice to see a comparison of just the sectors at issue rather than of the economy as a whole (pp. 238-9).
Of course I simplify in this brief review. This is a more nuanced and comprehensive argument than one that makes simply unit banking the root of all evil; a number of other legal restrictions get their share of knocks as well. The author's indictment of the historical legal restrictions on banking structure and performance and the woes to which they led is certainly vigorous and, overall, persuasive. Nevertheless, those of us of a certain age still remember the glory days of federal deposit insurance, a time when Friedman and Schwartz, certainly no government interventionists, could identify it as the principal contributor to monetary stability (1963, 442), and wonder whether its subsequent problems could have been due more to inept deregulation rather than to the original regulatory structure itself. Fast forwarding to the present, the case for universal banking might be a bit more compelling to some readers had not the melancholy experience of the Japanese banking system in the 1990's intervened. In sum, anyone with even the most tangential interest in financial history can learn something, or several things, from this volume. A copy should be in (almost) every home.
Reference: Friedman, Milton, and Anna Schwartz (1963), A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Geographic area: North America (7)
- Time period: 19th Century (7), 20th Century: Pre WWII (8), 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII (9)
- Subject: Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History (H)
Copyright © 2002 by EH.NET. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and EH.Net. For other permission, please contact the EH.NET Administrator (admin@eh.net; telephone 513-529-2229; fax: 513-529-6992). Published by EH.NET Feb 19 2002 All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://eh.net/bookreviews/.
Citation
John A. James, "Review of Charles W. Calomiris, U.S. Bank Deregulation in Historical Perspective." EH.Net Economic History Services, Feb 19 2002. URL: http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0451Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Media Disturbances
I believe the quiet appproach is best. We can all get along without namecalling or deprecating. Yes we don't agree. No one has ever agreed with me, or listened.... but I am in the process of finding my voice. I actually began singing as a way to express myself, but I chose to sing with the best in the world. Coastline Show Chorus. I couldn't stay, their knowledge is far more involved than mine. So I'm not the best in the world. But I know them.
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