Introducing PCB's new blog

Pull up a chair. This Substack is an experiment. It could get weird.

Welcome to the tumult

This Substack is an experiment. It constitutes an effort to reach some of the audiences that I engage in separate parts of my life - personal and professional - on topics that interest me most. 

Central Banking, Finance, and…Business Ethics?

Those who know me already will know me primarily as a professor of financial regulation at Wharton and a nonresident fellow in economics at Brookings. I am a financial historian and legal scholar writing at the intersection of law, history, finance, and politics. You can see my articles and books on these topics at my website, here.

I don't know quite where this Substack will land in terms of tone and content, so be ready for some tumult as I find the right rhythm. For that reason, I am keeping it free until there is sufficient traffic and interest to change the business model.

Another reason to keep it free is that I don't want to keep to one lane. As it is, I already want to write widely about topics involving central banks (especially the Fed and its history), bank supervision, money laundering, AI risk models (and their overlap with financial risk management), whether we have designed a financial system that intentionally props up the worst failures among us in the name of stability, crypto banking, and much else. There's a lot here - I look forward to continuing conversations started in the pages of scholarly journals and previously on Twitter (RIP) on these topics.

What many outside of Wharton don’t know is that, in addition to teaching courses on financial history and financial regulation, I am also a professor of business ethics where I teach a required ethics course to our MBAs. In that latter capacity I focus on new ways to teach and discuss business ethics that provides meaning to MBA students (and business leaders) without turning the entire thing into a long and tedious exercise in box-checking compliance. The privilege of teaching MBA students and others who come through Wharton about alternatives to the Ethics-Compliance Industrial Complex (TM) has been a defining one for me. I’m eager to open the discussion to others, including my alumni.

More than Professional Commentary

But there's so much more. Most of the ideas that motivate me toward a conception of the good life have little to do with the Federal Reserve or business ethics.

I am the father of four boys, married for 20 years to my best friend. As a result, I have many questions and thoughts about marriage and parenting.

I am a Christian and a Latter-day Saint who was not natively theistic but am deeply committed to the communitarian ethos of Mormonism and to the ineffability of my hard-won theism. I have a lot to say about religious identity especially relative to the scholarly world in which individuals with religious commitments are a vanishing breed.

I am a serious amateur powerlifter, with goals to enter the "1500 lb club" - meaning, in my case, a 400 lb bench press, a 500 lb squat, and a 600 lb deadlift. I am an unserious amateur triathlete, loving my first forays into that wild sport with aspirations toward something much bigger. I am somewhat obsessed with these sports and exercises and will talk endlessly about them to anyone who is interested.

I play and collect guitars of all kinds - classical guitar (my first love), jazz, acoustic, blues, rock, and everything else in between.

I read constantly, fiction and nonfiction, and want to spend more time in conversation with people about these books and ideas.

And so it will be that this Substack will be omnivorous and ecumenical. I want to share with this audience (or perhaps better, these audiences) the musings and reactions about all of these topics, personal and professional. While I expect the meat-and-potatoes of this blog will be about banking and central banking - past, present, future - I reserve the right to talk about all kinds of other topics. Today, for example, I have thoughts about:

1. how to run a research team of MBA students, undergraduates, and law students

2. the state of graduate business education in the 2020s, especially where business ethics requirements go wrong

3. hip flexor rotations in the bench press and new regulations requiring back contact for powerlifting competitions

4. why bike fittings are both over- and under-rated for triathletes

5. how the Guild Starfire IV stacks up against the Gretsch Electromatic and Gibson 335 for playing the blues

6. what evangelical critiques of Mormonism get right (and very wrong)

7. my views on children and social media, including my views on those with strong views about children and social media

8. my reactions to Character Limit, the new book about Elon Musk and Twitter/X

9. why Radiohead remains the greatest band of the last forty years, the travesty of Moon-shaped Pool notwithstanding

Buckle up

For those mostly here for the Fed commentary (or debates about In Rainbows vs OK Computer!), I'll be sure to mark and segment these posts so that they are easily filterable. For those intrigued by the rest of what may well be a blessed cacophony, let’s see where this goes. I doubt very much there is an interlocutor who shares all of my interests - I have never met one yet. I promise, however, some honest commentary on these seemingly disparate communities and interests.

Maybe I'll even convince some people to get into deadlifting. 

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