It's book launch time
Also Fed independence in and outside of the Supreme Court, narrating Substack, and my next triathlon
Isn’t that a beauty?
Mark your calendars: The History of Bank Supervision in America and the Road Ahead, Brookings Institution, June 10, 2025
Habemus librum! After many good years working on this book with my co-author Sean Vanatta (whose hand you see here; yes, he still wears denim jackets like it’s 1989), we are closing in on publication day.
Aaron Klein is hosting a book launch for us at Brookings on June 10, link above. It’s an action-packed day with Sheila Bair as our keynote speaker and several panels touching on the rich history of bank supervision, but importantly also what it all means for the future. Take a look at the link above: it will be live-streamed. I also hope you’ll join us for the event itself.
Also, pre-order the book to goose its first-day volume. We have a good chance of becoming the #1 New Release in Government Risk Management and 19th Century Political Scandals, but that depends on each one of you.
Also also, reach out if you want to do a book event.
Substack Live! with Chris Hughes, June 5, 2025, 12pm.
Speaking of events that you all should attend, I will be doing a Substack Live! — I can’t tell if that exclamation point is Chris’s or Substack’s or what, but I want the record to show that it is not mine, I am not that enthusiastic — where we will be talking about all things Fed independence.
When I wrote a book called The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve published in early 2016, I remember thinking that it would have been a better career move to publish a book called The Power and Independence of the FBI (these being the days when Jim Comey decided to hold press conferences about presidential candidates’ emails and all that). But today, the topic is everywhere. Chris Hughes, author of the outstanding recent book Marketcrafters: The 100-year Struggle to Shape the American Economy and my PhD student will host me in conversation about how Trump vs. Powell 2.0 is shaping up and how it fits in the broader historical context of Fed independence more generally.
Trump v. Wilcox, US Supreme Court, May 22, 2025 and Amicus Brief on behalf of Peter Conti-Brown in Support of Federal Agency Independence, April 16, 2025
Speaking of Fed independence, it was a blockbuster week last week at the Supreme Court as the justices ruled against Gwynne Wilcox, ousted member of the National Labor Relations Board, in its ongoing repudiation of Humphrey’s Executor.
I think this decision is a mistake. But I agree too with Chicago’s Will Baude that this is a hard problem on which reasonable minds can differ. The basic problem with agency independence is this: are these politically appointed bureaucrats making value judgments on which their expertise is only passingly relevant? If so, then ideological postures held over from previous electoral mandates are anti-democratic with no corresponding and offsetting benefit for the quality of policy. Or are these bureaucrats doing technical work that the electorate, through Congress, wants to insulate from political meddling? If that’s the case, then respecting the people’s ability to make laws that create that protection is not only good law, it’s good policy. As the saying goes, we want these experts on tap, not on top.
The problem is that agencies are doing both things, almost all the time, always on tap, often on top. So the policy problem is a hard one. The legal problem is not as hard, at least to me. An election does not wipe the legislative slate clean. All of us are participating in a policy drama whose libretto was mostly written before. But again, this has been a defining debate in administrative law for almost a century. Indeed, many historians have published many books showing that agency independence debates are much older than we thought. I am one of them. The conventional wisdom used to be that agency independence (and its associated problems) came about in the New Deal. The conventional wisdom is now that agency independence is a problem going back to the beginning of the American Republic.
What is most intriguing to me about Wilcox is the footnote dismissal of arguments like mine that Fed independence is agency independence. It’s not the Court’s finest work, as Lev Menand and Adam Levitin have each pointed out. To start, the comparand that the Court invokes — that the Fed is different because we had the Bank of the United States — simply isn’t there. The relevant entity to Wilcox at the Fed is the Board of Governors, which is structured in relevant part like all of these other independent agencies. It was very much a creature of the Progressive Era and, when restructured, the New Deal. There was no federal banking regulator at the nation’s founding. Even the use of the term “Federal Reserve” in the footnote is a dodge, since each of the relevant entities — the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve Banks, and the Board of Governors — are differently constituted and organized.
Anyway, I give a half cheer for this footnote. As a policy matter, I think some kind of insulation from political control for the Fed is very valuable, a towering achievement of democratic governance with some costs but many more benefits. I am glad that the Court appears primed to preserve it.
As a legal and historical matter, this is near gobbledygook.
Narrating my posts.
Substack has a feature that allows authors to read their posts for those people who prefer listening to their content over reading. I will confess that those of my readers so situated are mysterious creatures to me, but since I have been told many times that I have a face for radio, I have adopted the practice. The first instance was my post this week on bankers advising the Fed. (Side note: you all ate that one up. It has become my second most popular post after Finding Addie, the personal memoir post about my second mother.) The second is this one. I riff a bit, so it’s not an exact duplication. Will this lead to a podcast?
Rock Hall Maryland Olympic Triathlon, May 31, 2025
Y’all, this past month I have disappeared down the ole rabbit hole of delightful training. I can’t remember the last time I have felt this much focus on a specific goal. The main target of focus has been cycling. I love everything about this sport, in virtually all its manifestations (you fixies are still a strange tribe, but an alluring one…). Let’s just say that in the past six weeks, the Conti-Browns have not been part of the slowing of the American consumer economy. I also now know a bafflingly large amount about saddles, cranks, groupsets, wheels and tires, handlebars and cyclist’s palsy, and more than I thought possible about gravel vs. endurance vs. performance vs. triathlon cycling.
I have also been working my aggressive schedule to maintain strength while I cut mass and build an aerobic base. I have loved all five disciplines — dynamic mobility/yoga, powerlifting, swimming, running, cycling — but cycling has captured my imagination more than anything I can recall since I first picked up a guitar.
Test day is tomorrow. Regular readers will recall my 3:44 time at my last Olympic triathlon, only 16 minutes shy of a DNF. Tomorrow I anticipate a 3:15 or better. I am leaner, faster, and smarter than I was six weeks ago. Stay tuned for an update and wish me luck.