A Brief History of the U.S. Regulatory Perimeter

This paper provides a brief history of the U.S. financial regulatory perimeter, a legal cordon comprised of “positive†and “negative†restrictions on the conduct of banking organizations. Today’s regulatory perimeter faces a wide range of challenges, from disaggregation, to new commercial entrants, to new varieties of charters (and new uses of legacy charters). We situate these challenges in the longer history of American banking, identifying a pattern in debates about the nature, shape, and position of the perimeter: outside-in pressure, inside-out pressure, and reform and expansion. We also observe a shift in this pattern, beginning roughly three decades ago, which gradually made the perimeter broader, more complex, and arguably more permeable. We show this trend graphically in an animation accompanying this paper.