With the sudden return of financial instability in the spring of 2024 (Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, First Republic, etc.), the topic of financial oversight has returned to the headlines. What role can and should regulatory authorities play in the national and international financial system, particularly in times of crisis?
Our panel examines the development, implementation, and outcomes of financial regulation from a historical perspective. We will assess the channels through which financial rules become active—sometimes moving down from high-minded idea to law then to practice; sometimes moving up from ad hoc practice to effective law to ideological justification. With an emphasis on agency, we seek to show how historical actors—bureaucrats, politicians, economists, lawyers, and bankers—shaped financial oversight policy and practice. Our analysis sheds new light on regulatory efforts by bringing in recent scholarship in the fields of legal history, international relations, and economic governance. The goal, in this regard, is to contextualize financial regulation within a broader thematic scope.
Specific to this year’s panel is our interest in understanding regulation from the perspective of the public interest: To what extent has regulation been used to fulfill public-oriented goals, such as lowering unemployment or addressing inequality? What happens when these goals come into conflict with existing mandates, including inflation targeting and financial stability? What "public” do financial officials serve, and how do officials make tradeoffs between different interested publics? Finally, is there a way to reconcile these often-competing goals in understanding regulation from the present-day perspective? By bringing together a diverse array of temporal and geographic case studies, we aim to understand how regulation has (or has not) served a public interest.