Making money: Ideas and institutions in United States banking.

摘要

The banking process---accepting deposits and making loans---is fundamental to the U.S. economy, and it is highly political. In this process, money is created and allocated. Since the depression, three distinct kinds of financial institutions have engaged in the banking process: banks, savings and loans, and credit unions. These three kinds of depository intermediary institutions operated within separate regulatory frameworks. A "regulatory framework" is a set of interacting organizations including a distinctive basic actor, one or more regulatory agencies, rediscount institutions and a deposit insurer. But since the 1980s, deregulatory reform efforts have aimed to unify regulation of the three classes of depository intermediaries, standardizing their structure and process, and consolidating their regulatory agencies. The question of this dissertation is why, despite their apparently common economic function, there were three separate regulatory frameworks in the first place. The argument is that distinctive public philosophies led to construction of separate institutional frameworks. A "public philosophy" is an ideological paradigm that provides a basis for interpreting the social world and taking positions regarding what government should do. It has a view of the public's interests, cherishes certain values, and motivates policy evaluation and prescription. This study argues that "utilitarianism," "progressivism," and "populism" are institutionalized in the banking, savings and loan, and credit union frameworks, respectively. The current deregulatory reform effort takes strength from the resurgence of "neoliberal" public philosophy, a paradigm that views government and the economy as separable, and the configuration of economic institutions as the result not of public policy decisions, as argued in this study, but rather as driven by laws of economics. The study explores the implications, for values embedded in banking institutions based on other public philosophies, of applying prevailing neoliberal prescripts to banking policy. The research design is comparative and historical, inquiring into the purpose and design of institutions that comprise the separate regulatory frameworks, and into the public philosophies that undergird them. The focus is on debates over key legislation that established or changed these organizations. Congressional hearings, floor debate, statutes, and other congressional and administrative documents provide much of the data.