When you drive up to your bank or walk up to your teller, your main goal is to complete your transaction and move on with your day. The last thing on your mind is how that transaction is taking place. You don’t care what happens behind the scenes as long as your money is where it needs to be and is safe. As the banking and finance industry has transformed, so has the process of how your money is handled. To accompany those changes, regulators and lawmakers create laws designed to protect consumers, banks, and the economy as a whole. As you will learn, the history of the banking industry has changed drastically over the last two thousand years and even more so in the last century with the advance of technology. It only makes sense that those lawmakers must continue to update and invent new regulation to further protect those interested parties. My goal is to demonstrate just how rapidly and radically the finance industry has changed and how new elements being introduced to finance and banking will adapt the industry and the regulation.
In the world of finance and financial services, banking has been around longer than any other segment of that world. For more than two millenniums, bankers have served as “money changers” who aided people in exchanging foreign for local currencies. As this practice grew and many began to throw their funds into the banking system, the services that banks performed multiplied. Loans were granted and bankers collected interest. Most of
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The banking industry has over the years evolved from simple to large and complex organization. They have grown from one street building into having multiple branches some of which are international. Their clients range from individual and institutions to governments and other banks. Banks do not manufacture physical things. Their work is simply services for money (Koch & MacDonald 2010). Such services include storing, lending and managing money. All people and institutions, as well as governments, need money to operate accordingly.
All in all, I aim to assist in creating an illuminating understanding on American financial system and reforms through this public policy paper.
The American economy is a complex balance of services, financial, manufacturing, agricultural, and banking industries. For this reason, the U.S. is a global economy, relying upon foreign investments and trade to create and retain wealth. Over the years, America has evolved from farming-based, to industrial, to a services-based economy. As a result, the banking system from its inception has weathered the many growing pains associated with a new government and currency, instituting regulations and a centralized bank to examine the economy, and implement policies intended to offset factors negatively affecting the general financial health of the country.
In 2008, when the financial crisis occurred, millions of Americans were left without jobs and trillions of dollars of wealth was lost wealth. To make sure the Great Recession would not happen again, President Barrack Obama put into effect the Dodd- Frank Act. With the help of this law, banks will not be able to take irresponsible risks that had negative effects on the American people. Furthermore, with the Volcker Rule embedded into the act, it will ensure that banks are no longer allowed to own, invest, or sponsor hedge funds, private equity funds, or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their
Before the advent of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1933 and the general conception of government safety nets, the United States banking industry was quite different than it is today. Depositors assumed substantial default risk and even the slightest changes in consumer confidence could result in complete turmoil within the banking world. In addition, bank managers had almost complete discretion over operations. However, today the financial system is among the most heavily government- regulated sectors of the U.S. economy. This drastic change in public policy resulted directly from the industry’s numerous pre-regulatory failures and major disruptions that produced severe economic and social
Along with the greater profitability restrictions imposed on banks from the Dodd Frank comes the banks will for greater cost management, meaning job cuts. Already the Banks have begun laying employees off from burdening restrictions leading to this brutal method of retaining necessary capital needed for operations ("Wall Street Journal"). The bigger the bank, the greater resentment they have over this act. Their financial statements will have to retain a greater amount of compliance and transparency as well. Because of the large prominence of “shadow banking” and the concealed balance sheet elements that came along with this practice, the banks now are imposed with greater regulation to prevent these stealthy tactics of borrowing and investing. These restrictions, in my belief, will provide greater protection to the consumer but will also provoke institutions to begin innovating financial instruments to get around barriers, just as they did in the past with interstate banking and early consolidated services even before Glass-Steagalls act. The bankers oppose the act due to their cut in profits. Reduced outlets in revenue from specific revenue generating activities have been capped and larger expenses in order to comply with the new rules have also greatly cut profitability. The same notion is held with brokers. Because of the greater compliance costs served
According to the most recent Federal Reserve study; most of us haven’t set foot in a banking hall in ages. It is a lost battle to banks that opt to use traditional methods to conduct their banking transactions (Gup 2003). By December of last year, close to half of all smartphone users in the United States had transacted some or all of their banking on their phones and iPhones. In the United Kingdom alone, rates of mobile banking transactions doubled over the course of a single year (Scn Education 2001). A banking business that invests in this type of technology gets assured of increasing their customer base.
Nowadays, we have modernized banks many in trust their money in. The banks lends money to customers at a higher rate than they pay to depositors or than they borrow it. The difference, known as the margin is kept by the bank. For example, if a bank pays 1% interest on deposits they may charge 6% interest on loans grossing 5% for themselves. Moreover, bank employees from Wells Fargo secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses. Not only is this identity theft, however, it shines even more light on how the love of money is the root of all evil. Lastly, banks
Alexander Hamilton proposed using a banking system in America in 1781 after seeing how beneficial they were in other nations for advancing trade. In 1791, First Bank of the United States became the first commercial bank of the United States in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By the 1900’s, there were almost 170 banks per every million people in the United States, but because of this, there was a lot of debate about banking and the regulations needed and the fears that people had about the amount of control it was giving the government. This paper will be starting from the Great Depression and talk its way into the current situation of the United States banking regulations and why there is a debate on if there should be more or fewer regulations on banking.
Over the past several decades the world has seen what the culprits are with financial instability. From the Great Depression, to the housing bubble crisis of 2008, the economy suffers from many fundamental problems that damper our financial situation. In The Bankers’ New Clothes, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig explain the struggles of banking regulation in order to gain a better understanding of financial intermediation and how it affects us. Admati and Hellwig provide a forceful and accessible analysis of the recent financial crisis and also offer proposals on how to prevent any future financial failures. The way they achieve this is by engaging us, in plain language, by cutting through the confusion and acknowledging the issues of banking.
Technological advancement has had a gigantic effect in the banking industry. Over the past few decades, the financial services industry has changed considerably with banking transforming from the pen and paper method to the computers and internet method. The pen and paper method took weeks or even months for the transaction to be eventually completed, and then the dramatic introduction of the computer and internet method which changed that time frame to only a matter of seconds to be completed, which reduced the amount of time and labor needed to complete a transaction significantly. Banking is considered one of the most important economic sectors with it being severely influential and responsive to any little change, whether it is domestic or international. Some extreme changes that were brought about by the development of this new technology turned into a globalized nature for the financial services industry. One stroke of a key on a computer could and would change a person 's life extensively or even have a global impact. The new technologies that were created and introduced changed how the consumers managed their money from that time on. Technology has helped to protect peoples’ hard earned money and make it much more impossible for people to be able to write out bad checks or even holding up a bank. The advancement in technology however, also came with some security risks as most things do, that could affect the money that people trusted with the bank and
Financial regulation is necessary and without an efficient set of regulations a country could see rises in unemployment, interest rates, and the deterioration of financial intermediaries. With the globalization of the financial industry, it becomes more and more common for businesses to seek financing outside of their county 's boarders. These innovations in the financial industry stress why it is so important for regulations to be created and changed to reduce risk and asymmetric information in financial systems.
Financial services: These are services provided by the finance industry, which comprises a broad range of businesses that manage money, including banks, credit card companies, consumer finance companies, insurance companies, real estate funds, investment funds. In 2004, 20% of the market capitalization of S&P 500 in US is represented by a Financial service industry and grew to 50% in 2010.
Private banking industry has changed in a very basic way, driven by many key factors such as: free competition systems, modern developments in information technology (in particular, developments of the internet), and changing demographics. Private banks now operate in an environment shaped by increasing and shifting regulations, and in markets influenced by the uncontrolled situations of the world economy and geopolitical issues.