New Books In Public Policy

Think that today's debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, financial regulation, "too big to fail", etc. are new? Think again. Who should control banks, who should regulate banks, what should banks even do--these questions have been debated since the founding of the Republic. Replace CNBC's David Faber with Alexander Hamilton, and Joe Kernan with Thomas Jefferson (or James Madison) and the arguments about banking, moral hazard, and regulation would be largely the same, though the attire would be quite different. Kathleen Day's new book Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street (Yale University Press, 2019) provides a detailed two-century history of the give and take between government authority and financial institutions (and the individuals caught between them). The challenges over time have changed--the absence of a single currency in the early 19th century, insufficient credit in the late 19th century, the roaring and patently stupid 1920s, and then the whole range