ABSTRACT
For more than a century, U.s. financial regulation reflected the nation's predominant concern with the soundness and stability of its financial institutions. Beginning in the 1970s, however, competition among the various institutions and sectors began to be advanced as apreeminent goal of financial regulation. A certain amount of tension naturally exists between these two public policy goals. The earlier U.S. experience of periodic bank failures, financial crises, and economic downtums tended to swing the pendulum in the direction of safeguarding the financial system.1 Concern with competition among financial institutions only gained prominence after a long trend of economic and financial stability.
