ABSTRACT
While concentration and consolidation proceeded on Wall Street, New York Clearing House officers led a movement to reduce competition and to bring more cooperation and stability to the financial center. During 1911, the movement gathered national momentum when the William Howard Taft administration appeared to endorse similar clearing house innovations in other cities and to exclude the regulatory rulings of the quasi-public clearing houses from the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The movement for banker self-regulation acquired another political dimension when Senator Nelson W. Aldrich proposed a more centralized banking system that he patterned explicitly on clearing houses. Powerful opposition to clearing house reforms from state bankers, trust company directors, country bankers, state banking officials and local and state politicians revealed the serious political limitations of banker self-regulation and suggested the breadth of resistance to a more centralized banker-controlled system.
