Financial supervision from an historical perspective: was the development of such supervision designed, or largely accidental? CHARLES A . E . GOODHART

I have approached the history of financial supervision through the lens of a Central Bank (CB) economist, and have focused on two periods of history. The first relates to the period before 1914, working primarily on US banking history (Goodhart, 1969) and UK banking history (Goodhart, 1972) – both primarily relating to the period 1895-1914 – before turning to a more general study of central banking in developed countries in The Evolution of Central Banks (Goodhart, 1988), with much of the material for that coming out of the invaluable studies of CB and monetary histories contained in the collected papers of the US National Monetary Commission (1910/1911). The next section of this chapter is essentially a potted version of that collection of work.