This book will be particularly useful to those who want undergraduate history students to learn how the American banking system has evolved in the last 50 years. Young Americans today are accustomed to the existence of supermarket banks that engage in a wide range of activities and which operate in all regions of the country. In 1960, the United States was served by a vast number of small banks, whereas retail banking in culturally proximate nations such as Canada and the United Kingdom had long since come to be dominated a few large branch banks. Mark Rose, who remembers this system and witnessed its transformation, has drawn on a wide range of primary sources to offer an explanation for how the American banking system became consolidated and how the particular way this consolidation unfolded contributed to the financial crisis of 2007–2009.

Rose’s narrative begins with the Kennedy administration and concludes with reflections on the making of banking policy under Donald Trump. Rose introduces us to a cast of characters that includes well-known policymakers and bankers such as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Citicorp CEO Walter Wriston as well less-known, but nevertheless influential, individuals. Rose ably explains how Kennedy’s Comptroller of the Currency James J. Saxon wanted to change the regulatory framework to permit bank consolidation. Rose chronicles how Saxon faced opposition from politicians such as Wright Patman, who was suspicious of his reforms, and from William McChesney Martin of the Federal Reserve. While Saxon ran into obstacles, he was able to make incremental changes in bank regulation that moved the United States in the direction of liberalisation and thus bank consolidation. Rose shows how officials in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations continued to push the United States in the policy direction that culminated in the Financial Services Modernization Act, commonly known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was signed into law in by President Clinton in 1999. This legislation was crucial because it repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933’s restrictions on institutions the combined the functions of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the theory that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a root cause was debated.

One of the great strengths of this book is that it introduces readers to the various federal agencies that collectively regulate the financial system. The book reveals that the author is passionate about his subject and is deeply concerned about important social issues such as racial inequality. For instance, on pages 144–5 he discusses the impact of the subprime mortgage crisis on racial minorities.

While there is much to like about this book, there are weaknesses. This book lacks a comparative element and does not tell us which theoretical lens, if any, that the author used. The acknowledgement sections of this book, which mention the authors who commented on earlier drafts of his work, is striking in a number of ways. The list of authors who exchanged ideas with Rose is skewed heavily towards scholars in history departments and does not include any of the economists and finance professors who have published historical research aimed at understanding the long-term roots of the 2008 financial crisis. The list is also skewed towards individuals who live in the United States, which is astonishing when we consider some of the banks described in the book were global, at least in life. Rose does not really address the historical explanation for the crisis offered by Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen Haber, although these important researchers are mentioned briefly in a footnote. Calomiris and Haber adopt a comparative historical perspective and contrast the evolution of bank regulation in Canada and the United States, but Canada does not even appear in Rose’s index, which is odd given that Canada can serve as a sort of natural experiment for testing various theories about the cause of the crisis. Some international readers will be concerned about the lack of a comparative dimension in this book, and the decision of the author to ignore the Basel capital accords.

The central thesis of this book is that the evolution of the American banking system over the last half century has been a highly politicized process and that the present-day banking system is not the product of pure market forces. Rose does not quote or cite any academic or popular author who subscribes to the view that the distinctive banking system of the United States developed the way it did without heavy involvement via policymakers. I suspect that nobody actually subscribes to that viewpoint: the heavily politicized nature of the banking system is universally acknowledged. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Americans vigorously debated which bad laws were most responsible. Conservative media commenters focused on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and created a narrative that attributed the subprime mortgage crisis to policies that encouraged banks to lend money to minorities who were poor credit risks. This narrative, and the academic research that refuted it, goes undiscussed here which represents a missed opportunity to dispel a myth that many undergraduate readers may bring into the classroom. Indeed, the author ignores many of the other structural explanations for the crisis that have been advanced by libertarians, conservatives, technocrats, and socialists in the United States and in the other countries that were affected by the global financial crisis. Given that this book is much shorter than Adam Tooze’s recent book on the crisis (Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. London: Penguin, 2018), the author could easily have added a chapter to evaluate the competing explanations for the crisis in light of his very impressive historical research in the archive.