BOOK REVIEWS

Abstract

Regulation and compliance professionals and students of regulation will find these books interesting and thought provoking. Although many a reader would be justifiably sceptical about a book with ‘The Future of…’ in its title Alan Gait's work contains so much valuable historical detail about US banking, insurance and securities regulation that it manages to avoid being just another journalistic work of financial punditry. It is an ambitious book and raises some very big questions in the introduction. Was regulation of financial markets and institutions called for in the 1930s? Was deregulation of financial markets and institutions called for in the 1970s and 1980s? Is reregulation of financial institutions called for in the 1990s? What changes in regulation and financial structure are likely to take place by the year 2000? It seeks to answer these and many (almost too many) other questions by casting a historical perspective on each of the three industries, examining issues like structural change, the impact of technology and the future of all of the major players within the financial services industry and asking what they bode for the future of regulation. For those prepared to read all 386 pages it is a mine of information and, to a lesser degree, insights providing an excellent overview of the past, present and possible future US regulatory scene. However, the book has been written with the busy professional in mind who may be interested only in one of the three industries covered and so it has been designed to be read as a handbook into which one can dip and read only, say, the banking chapters, this automatically detracts from the book's ability to provide a sustained and layered intellectual analysis of some of the big questions asked in the introduction and leaves the reader with the impression of a descriptive account. Subject to that caveat the reader who wishes to deepen their knowledge of the US regulatory scene will enjoy the historical chapter on securities and investment regulation 1940–79 and the chapter on deposit insurance and bank failures puts the Savings and Loans debacle into perspective. Part Four on future prospects for regulation lacks rigour and detail but a useful glossary of US financial terms appears at the end of the book as does an Appendix of major legislation affecting US depository institutions which could have been usefully extended to cover securities and insurance legislation too.

Citation

Gray, J. (1996), "BOOK REVIEWS", Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 196-198. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb024883