Mark Rose, Florida Atlantic University

“Banking on Politics”
Mark Rose, Florida Atlantic University

During the 1960s, federal and state law kept bankers out of insurance and other financial services; and, many states including Illinois even prohibited branch banking. In 1998, Sanford Weill’s Citigroup and Hugh McColl’s Bank of America emerged as a result of political and legal struggles that extended back four decades. The appearance of those universal banks also represented the concluding point in a process of devolving authority to bankers and deinstitutionalizing parts of the former regulatory regime. To understand the arrival of full-service banks, grinding politics rather than neoliberal passion is perhaps the most useful concept of all.