Commercial Banking In An Era Of Deregulation

Global competition, technological development, and changes in banking laws and regulations are transforming the role of commercial banks and the nature of the banking business within the U.S. financial system. The earlier editions of this work have been revised and expanded to incorporate discussions of these dramatic changes and their results. The discussions of the issues have been kept as current as possible, and a solid background has been supplied to provide perspective. Emphasis has been placed on the management of commercial banks through the formulation and implementation of sound and flexible policies.

Financial institutions in developed countries have undergone a profound structural change in recent years. As a result, banking has become internationalized and competition has intensified within vast and complex markets for a range of financial services. This book reviews these changes.

With almost 6,300 commercial banks, significantly more than in any other country, the world of US banking is unique, fascinating, and always in flux. Two principal pieces of legislation have shaped the banking structure in this country: The McFadden Act of 1927, which prohibited banks from branching into other states, and The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated commercial and investment banking activities. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was one of the main contributing factors behind the global financial crisis of 2008. This measure resulted in the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which once again prohibited commercial banks from making certain types of speculative investments. The Changing Face of American Banking analyzes the impact of both these acts - as well as that of their subsequent repeal - in depth, examining the real effects of government regulations on the US commercial banking sector. Ray Chaudhuri pinpoints the evolving nature of US commercial banks and banking regulations and explores their impact on the economy. Instead of just focusing on banks and regulations, this work considers the correlations and causality between banking performance and economic growth and productivity. It also brings the banking literature up to date with the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its aftermath, including the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and its effect on American banking.

This book shows how deregulation is transforming the size, structure, and geographic range of U.S. banks, the scope of banking services, and the nature of bank-customer relationships. Over the past two decades the characteristics that had made American banks different from other banks throughout the world--a fragmented geographical structure of the industry, which restricted the scale of banks and their ability to compete with one another, and strict limits on the kinds of products and services commercial banks could offer--virtually have been eliminated. Understanding the origins and persistence of the unique banking regulations that defined U.S. banking for over a century lends an important perspective on the economic and political causes and consequences of the current process of deregulation.

This is a reprint of a previously published book. It is composed of a series of papers written for a two-day conference at NYU in 1978 dealing with the problems involved in the deregulation of the banking and securities industries.

A wave of liberalization swept the developed world at end of the twentieth century. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, most developed countries have passed various measures to liberalize and modernize the financial markets. Each country had its agenda, but most of them have experienced, to a different extent, a change in regulatory regime. This change, often labeled deregulation and associated with the advent of neoliberalism, was sharply contrasting with the previous era of the Bretton Woods system, which has sometimes been portrayed as an era of financial repression. On the other hand, a quick glance at financial regulation today - at the amount of paper it produces, at its complexity, at the number of people involved, and at the resources invested in it - is enough to say that, somehow, there is more regulation today than ever before. In the new system, financial regulation has taken unprecedented importance. As more archival material is becoming available, a better understanding of the fundamental changes in the regulatory environment towards the end of the twentieth century is now possible. What kind of change exactly was deregulation? Did competition between financial regulators lead to a race to the bottom in regulation? Is deregulation responsible for the recurring financial crises which seem to have characterised the international financial system since the 1980s? The movement towards a more liberal regulatory regime was neither linear nor simple. This book - a collection of chapters studying deregulation in various countries and contexts - examines the national and international pathways of deregulation by providing an in-depth analysis of a short but crucial period in a few major countries.