“Banking, Law, and American Liberalism: The Rise and Regulation of Bank Holding Companies in the Twentieth Century” excavates the history of the bank holding company, a corporation that owns or controls one or more United States banks, and the movement to prevent its monopolistic expansion in the twentieth century. Utilizing the battle for bank holding company reform as a lens through which to trace the development of antimonopoly law and policy, this dissertation argues that banking played a generative role in the origins and endurance of the American antimonopoly tradition. That tradition, it contends, neither began in the late nineteenth century with the advent of antitrust laws nor comprised a singular modality of reform. From the public provision of currency and credit to delegating and dispersing the privilege of money creation, from central banking to public utility regulation, antimonopolists pioneered differing methods and legal tools to combat the concentration of financial power.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, powerful antimonopoly impulses had contributed to the entrenchment of a decentralized banking system comprised of predominantly small, local banks largely prohibited from expanding geographically or engaging in commercial business. The emergence of the holding company as a means of concentrating capital and control in the Gilded Age therefore served as an invaluable mechanism for evading the regulatory constraints of federal and state banking law. Through a bank holding company, enterprising bankers could acquire the stock of innumerable banks and businesses despite restrictions on branch banking and mixing banking and commerce. Though early efforts to prevent the use of the bank holding company device to escape regulation arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, they were largely ineffective. Rather, a wide-ranging and potent antimonopoly movement premised upon the danger bank holding companies posed to American democracy succeeded only in the aftermath of World War II.
Culminating in the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, the movement for bank holding company reform represents a pivotal, yet virtually unacknowledged, chapter of the American antimonopoly tradition. Challenging longstanding narratives of political economy that portray World War II as the “end of reform” and the antitrust movement as a faded passion, this dissertation argues that antimonopoly ideals survived long after their supposed demise and continued to structure national policymaking well into the postwar decades. Tracing the rise and regulation of bank holding companies ultimately reveals the complexity, breadth, and remarkable resiliency of American antimonopoly law and policy as it evolved across centuries. / 2024-11-03T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45302 |
| Date | 03 November 2022 |
| Creators | Grischkan, Jamie Michelle |
| Contributors | Ferleger, Louis |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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