Bank Regulation and Credit Rating Organizations

Abstract

The banking crisis of 2008 is not unique in American banking history. Banks have had a long checkered past with major panics, federal–state conflict, calls for regulation and deregulation, fraud, and incompetence. Nevertheless, they also constituted the base upon which the United States expanded from a rural, agricultural, backwater economy to the remarkable strength it possesses today, both domestically and abroad. It began almost mystically with one of a number of brilliant men who led the British colony in the New World to a new nation, Alexander Hamilton. As the first Secretary of the Treasury, he had the vision to see the need for a central bank that would underlie the growth of the newly independent country. He proposed what later became the First Bank of the United States (1791–1811), which expanded with branches in a number of cities, along with state banks that also flourished in competition with each other.