scholarly journals The United States: The First Formalization of Banking Supervision

Author(s):  
Eiji Hotori ◽  
Mikael Wendschlag ◽  
Thibaud Giddey

AbstractThis chapter examines the formalization of banking supervision in the United States (US), focusing on the federal level. During the “free banking era” from the late 1830s to 1864, several state governments created banking supervisory systems at the state level. Triggered by the fiscal needs of the Civil War, as well as the demand for a national currency, the US became the first country to introduce uniform nationwide banking supervision with the creation of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the national banking system. The main purpose of the OCC was to ensure that the national banks did not violate the regulations related to the new currency, the US dollar. From a historical perspective, the rapid social and economic development of the US from the 1850s provided the background for this institutional change. Although the US case demonstrates that financial crises have not always driven the formalization of banking supervision, the crises of 1907 and the Great Depression served to further strengthen the formalization of banking supervision by prompting the introduction of multi-agency banking supervision in the US.

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-46
Author(s):  
João Rafael Cunha

The 1980s was one of the most eventful and consequential decades in the development of the US financial system. During this decade, the regulatory framework established in response to the Great Depression started to be dismantled. These regulatory changes were a key driving force behind the transformation of the banking sector. Moreover, the end of the decade saw the most serious banking crisis since the Great Depression. This pattern of deregulation and crises, which started in the 1980s, has continued until the present. Thus, it is worth study this period in greater detail and the consequences it has had for the US banking and financial system. The chapter argues that the deregulatory process that started in the 1980s in the banking industry in the United States has changed the profile of this sector. Between the Great Depression and the 1980s, the banking sector in the United States was a stable, yet not competitive sector. The financial deregulation of the 1980s changed this sector to a competitive, yet unstable one. This deregulatory process occurred mostly as a response to the economic conditions of the 1970s.


2007 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Redenius

As reflected in the April 2006 issue of the Financial History Review, monetary historians remain divided over the central features of the US monetary union and their contribution to US economic development. In that issue – which focused on the monetary union formed by the Constitution and early federal monetary legislation – Ronald Michener and Robert E. Wright focused on the creation of a uniform unit of account defined in terms of specie. The establishment of a uniform unit of account ‘simplified domestic and international transactions’ compared with the colonial period when ‘[e]conomic calculations across regions were complicated by the fact that people had to reckon with different units of account, without the aid of electronic calculators’. By contrast, Richard Sylla emphasised the role the Bank of the United States played in reducing the costs and risks of clearing and settling interregional payments. An institution, like the Bank, that operated on a national scale was particularly important in the United States because of the limited geographical scope of state bank operations. The Bank's notes and deposits became a truly national monetary standard, and the Bank helped to maintain the value of state bank notes, the principal means of cash payment in the antebellum economy, by enforcing par redemption.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Marsden

The freedom to practice one’s religious belief is a fundamental human right and yet, for millions of people around the world, this right is denied. Yearly reports produced by the US State Department, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Open Doors International, Aid to the Church in Need and Release International reveal a disturbing picture of increased religious persecution across much of the world conducted at individual, community and state level conducted by secular, religious, terrorist and state actors. While religious actors both contribute to persecution of those of other faiths and beliefs and are involved in peace and reconciliation initiatives, the acceptance of the freedom to practice one’s faith, to disseminate that faith and to change one’s faith and belief is fundamental to considerations of the intersection of peace, politics and religion. In this article, I examine the political background of the United States’ promotion of international religious freedom, and current progress on advancing this under the Trump administration. International Religious Freedom (IRF) is contentious, and seen by many as the advancement of US national interests by other means. This article argues that through an examination of the accomplishments and various critiques of the IRF programme it is possible, and desirable, to discover what works, and where further progress needs to be made, in order to enable people around the world to enjoy freedom of thought, conscience and religion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 599-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colton Margus ◽  
Ritu R. Sarin ◽  
Michael Molloy ◽  
Gregory R. Ciottone

AbstractIntroduction:In 2009, the Institute of Medicine published guidelines for implementation of Crisis Standards of Care (CSC) at the state level in the United States (US). Based in part on the then concern for H1N1 pandemic, there was a recognized need for additional planning at the state level to maintain health system preparedness and conventional care standards when available resources become scarce. Despite the availability of this framework, in the years since and despite repeated large-scale domestic events, implementation remains mixed.Problem:Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) rejuvenates concern for how health systems can maintain quality care when faced with unrelenting burden. This study seeks to outline which states in the US have developed CSC and which areas of care have thus far been addressed.Methods:An online search was conducted for all 50 states in 2015 and again in 2020. For states without CSC plans online, state officials were contacted by email and phone. Public protocols were reviewed to assess for operational implementation capabilities, specifically highlighting guidance on ventilator use, burn management, sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) score, pediatric standards, and reliance on influenza planning.Results:Thirty-six states in the US were actively developing (17) or had already developed (19) official CSC guidance. Fourteen states had no publicly acknowledged effort. Eleven of the 17 public plans had updated within five years, with a majority addressing ventilator usage (16/17), influenza planning (14/17), and pediatric care (15/17), but substantially fewer addressing care for burn patients (9/17).Conclusion:Many states lacked publicly available guidance on maintaining standards of care during disasters, and many states with specific care guidelines had not sufficiently addressed the full spectrum of hazard to which their health care systems remain vulnerable.


2000 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Currie ◽  
Joseph Ferrie

This article examines the effect of state-level legal innovations governing labor disputes in the late 1800s. This was a period of legal ferment in which worker organizations and employers actively lobbied state governments for changes in the rules governing labor disputes. Cross-state heterogeneity in the legal environment provides an unusual opportunity to investigate the effects of these laws. We use a unique data set with information on 12,965 strikes to show that most of these law changes had surprisingly little effect on strike incidence or outcomes. Important exceptions were maximum hours laws and the use of injunctions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marietta Armanyous

There is limited research available on the issue concerning undocumented immigrants’ access to post-secondary education in the Canadian context. This paper addresses this matter by highlighting the pro-access efforts currently being made in Canada and outlining various actions taken in the United States (US), which Canada can also implement. Guided by the human right to education as its theoretical framework, this paper examines the existing barriers to accessing post-secondary education that this particular marginalized group faces in Canada and the US. It assesses the policies that US state governments, US universities, and Canadian universities implemented (or plan to implement) to remove these barriers, thereby allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain formal post-secondary education. Key Words: undocumented immigrants; post-secondary education; human right to education; Canada; United States


Author(s):  
Fred S. Lu ◽  
Andre T. Nguyen ◽  
Nicholas B. Link ◽  
Marc Lipsitch ◽  
Mauricio Santillana

AbstractEffectively designing and evaluating public health responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic requires accurate estimation of the weekly incidence of COVID-19. Unfortunately, a lack of systematic testing across the United States (US) due to equipment shortages and varying testing strategies has hindered the usefulness of the reported positive COVID-19 case counts. We introduce three complementary approaches to estimate the cumulative incidence of symptomatic COVID-19 during the early outbreak in each state in the US as well as in New York City, using a combination of excess influenza-like illness reports, COVID-19 test statistics, and COVID-19 mortality reports. Instead of relying on an estimate from a single data source or method that may be biased, we provide multiple estimates, each relying on different assumptions and data sources. Across our three approaches, there is a consistent conclusion that estimated state-level COVID-19 symptomatic case counts from March 1 to April 4, 2020 varied from 5 to 50 times greater than the official positive test counts. Nationally, our estimates of COVID-19 symptomatic cases in the US as of April 4 have a likely range of 2.2 to 5.1 million cases, with possibly as high as 8.1 million cases, up to 26 times greater than the cumulative confirmed cases of about 311,000. Extending our method to May 16, 2020, we estimate that cumulative symptomatic incidence ranges from 6.0 to 12.2 million, which compares with 1.5 million positive test counts. Our approaches demonstrate the value of leveraging existing influenza-like-illness surveillance systems during the flu season for measuring the burden of new diseases that share symptoms with influenza-like-illnesses. Our methods may prove useful in assessing the burden of COVID-19 during upcoming flu seasons in the US and other countries with comparable influenza surveillance systems.


2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
FERNANDO J. CARDIM DE CARVALHO

ABSTRACT The crisis initiated in the United States in 2007, and spread worldwide in 2008, has been compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s. They have in common a deep fall in the level of activity (although in the 2010s government intervention was able to contain the fall before it could reach the dimensions of the 1930s), followed by a period where recovery is uncertain and fragile, as has been the case both in the US and in Western Europe. The paper outlines a theory of depression that comprises both aspects. The theory draws on the theoretical contributions of Keynes, Fisher, Minsky and Leijonhufvud, proposing that the concept of "corridor of stability" may help to explain how an initial adverse aggregate shock may lead to a contractionary spiral, where debt deflation is main mechanism to explain the downward movement of the economy and why one should expect a period of weak and volatile recovery to follow it.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tima T. Moldogaziev ◽  
James E. Monogan ◽  
Christopher Witko

AbstractProminent public policy models have hypothesised that rising income inequality will lead to more redistributive spending. Subsequent theoretical advancements and empirical research often failed to find a positive relationship between inequality and redistributive spending, however. Over the last few decades both income inequality and redistributive spending have been growing in the United States states. In this work, we consider whether temporal variation in inequality can explain variation in redistributive spending, while controlling for a number of factors that covary with redistributive spending in the states. In an analysis of data for 1976–2008, we find that higher levels of inequality are associated with greater redistributive spending, offering empirical evidence that fiscal policy at the state level responds to growing levels of income inequality. Considering the growing role of state governments in welfare provision during the past several decades, this finding is relevant for policy researchers and practitioners at all levels of government.


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