I generated an AI image on Open Banking but it was called Open Bowling and the banker’s hands had three thumbs. I thought we were past this, AI. So here’s a picture of a plant growing out of pennies.

On Monday I promised a deeper look at “open banking,” the framework under which banks (or other financial institutions) must hand over customer data to any third party authorized by that customer. This is sometimes called the Section 1033 debate, for the part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that permits it. My argument from Monday was that this debate scrambles conventional political lines because, in part, it’s not obvious which side better protects consumers or better promotes competition.

Some background is helpful. In 2024, the Biden CFPB made the first effort to give Congress’s instruction a regulatory life. Its 2024 rule would have required banks to build standardized interfaces that would permit any consumer-authorized third party fintech to receive all of that customer’s data, with all expenses borne by the bank and none by the fintech. The banks sued the same day. A federal judge enjoined the rule last October, by which point the Trump CFPB—or whatever you call that ghostly place—had decided to rewrite the rule, and a proposed draft has been sitting at the White House since August 4.

Meanwhile JPMorgan Chase, perhaps the largest of the so-called “data providers,” has jumped the line ahead of the regulation and struck deals with the largest of the so-called “data aggregators,” including Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar, and Akoya. The providers are the ones who gather the consumer data; the aggregators are the ones that purport to speak on behalf of the consumers but who are, in fact, also making a new business model out of using that data for purposes that the consumers may or may not understand. The deals permit data-sharing on a for-fee basis: consumers have to click through on a contract that accepts those terms, with no ability to shape those terms.

I think this is probably okay. I don’t love it from a consumer rights perspective, in the sense that consumer data is still being tossed about pretty freely, with almost no oversight, into the far reaches of the internet, with uneven (or unknowably uneven) standards of care.

Here’s my view on open banking. It’s not really open, and is only barely banking. It’s a data analytics business parading about with a consumer-rights cape in the name of financial services competition that isn’t obviously happening.

I am persuaded that there are instances of banks making it very hard to price shop. Deposits are much stickier than they should be. And apps like Quicken Simplifi or other budgeting tools are brilliant; I have used them since long before Dodd and Frank made their marriage a law. And the data is, after all, the consumer’s, not the bank’s, and should be free to migrate according to consumer preference.

Even so. There’s more going on here that makes me nervous. My hope for the new 1033 rule, when it is proposed, is that the CFPB prices and polices “open banking” so that everyone is subject to the same consumer protection requirements—banks, brokers, fintechs, whatever—and that fintechs cannot pretend to innovate on the backs of skipping the hard work of actual innovation and regulation.

Five parties, one button

Most of the confusion here comes from treating “open banking” as one single idea, that data wants to be free. That’s not correct. Open banking includes five different parties with very different interests. Opening the spigot doesn’t solve consumer rights problems simply by being open: it may in fact make those problems worse.

First, the data provider: your bank or card issuer or broker. It is the one that holds your account, your transaction information, your identity, etc. It is also the one that carries the full brunt of the regulatory and supervisory burden. There is a vast architecture that arose in the 1960s and accelerated dramatically in 1999 meant to force these financial institutions to safeguard consumer information. The financial institutions are subject to all of those burdens, none of which is cheap.

Second, the interface. This is the plumbing of the system that makes it possible for consumers to interact with their providers. Under the 2024 rule the financial institution—the data provider—had to build and maintain a “developer interface,” an API that made it possible for third parties to get access to that data. This API, or pipe, is a cost center, covered entirely by the bank—meaning, by the least price-sensitive consumer.

Read more

1. Kevin Warsh, In Our Time, At “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy,” an economic policy symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 28, 2026

Along with just about everyone else, I was very impressed by Chairman Warsh’s Jackson Hole keynote. My biggest concern before the conference wasn’t that he would capitulate to Trump in a coming fight, though that is indeed a concern. Nor was it that he would fold on the assault on Lisa Cook, though that worries me too. The biggest concern is that his rhetorical predilection for big, broad, badly alliterated pronouncements would give us the word salads that he has offered historically.

His speech was not a word salad. Despite an idiosyncratic preference for the dramatic ellipsis and an unusually high quantity of self-reference, he came and said what needed to be said to lift the mist from his earlier hazy pronouncements. Here’s the key language that everyone heard, that Warsh knew everyone would hear.

The Fed’s price-stability objective of 2 percent, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, is a firm, fixed target. Let’s be equally clear about another aspect of the objective: Price stability is not self-executing, nor is inflation necessarily mean-reverting. It is the Fed’s job to deliver stable prices.

There it is. That’s it.

It’s a big deal to hear him state what has been conventional wisdom so clearly. It is also something of a pivot. I was glad to see it.

It means that the default expectation is a rate increase, not a default for continued pause. And it means that the probability of a coming confrontation with President Trump just increased. The FOMC is likely to increase rates through the midterms, which will annoy Republicans whom Trump has trained to view the Fed through a nakedly partisan lens.

There is always an election on in America, so every policy change can be interpreted through these partisan lenses. But Warsh has now made the case that despite his somewhat mystical flirtations with the monetary transformations of AI, he knows what a central bank has been built to do, right here, right now, in the face of what is happening today, not what might be the downstream effects of artificial intelligence.

2. CFPB Open Banking Rewrite Could Put Data-Access Fees at Center of Section 1033 Fight, PYMNTS, August 10, 2026

Everyone loves an underdog. We tend to identify with them, want to speak truth to power, want to favor the oppressed over the oppressors, cheer for David over Goliath.

The current fight over so-called “open banking” has been pitched as precisely this kind of fight. Open banking refers to the legal and technical framework under which a bank must, at a customer’s direction, hand that customer’s account data—transactions, balances, terms—over to a third party that the customer has authorized. The third parties are typically a fintech app. In the United States that framework rests on Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank, a sparse provision that sat dormant for more than a decade before the CFPB got around to implementing it in a dramatically changed technological context.

If you listen to the Financial Technology Association, the fintech lobby whose board includes Plaid, or to FDATA North America, the trade group for the data aggregators themselves, you would think that the big bad Goliath of the incumbent financial institutions are hoarding customer data, making it harder for those customers to gain control over their financial lives with the help of the slingshot-wielding Davids, all so that the incumbents can reduce competition.

I don’t think of it this way, though. What if David is actually a Goliath?

The issue here is that we have these fintechs, some of whom are giants in their own rights, who want access to customer data not to decrease frictions for consumer banking but for their own purposes. Plaid, the largest of the aggregators, was valued at $8 billion earlier this year, was nearly acquired by Visa for $5 billion before antitrust regulators objected, and is not obviously the underdog in a room with most banks in America. Its predecessor as the biggest aggregator, Yodlee, sold anonymized transaction data pulled from tens of millions of consumers’ bank and card accounts to hedge funds and research firms—data that, a leaked internal document suggested, wasn’t so anonymous after all—prompting Senators Wyden and Brown to ask the FTC to investigate. Plaid itself paid $58 million in 2022 to settle a class action alleging it harvested more data than the apps it served actually needed and used login screens that mimicked the user’s own bank. Plaid denied the allegations, but agreed to delete data and change its interface.

Point is: The “consumer” in “consumer-permissioned data” is not always the party doing the permitting with full information.

Originally, the Biden CFPB finalized a broad rule in October 2024 that would have required banks and other data providers above $850 million in assets to build standardized interfaces, hand over customer data to any consumer-authorized third party, and do so without charging any fee whatsoever—while imposing use restrictions on the recipients that barred selling the data or using it for targeted advertising. But the banking industry sued the same day, and the Trump Administration—after first telling the court the rule was unlawful and should be vacated—reversed course and is now in the process of reproposing it. The revised proposal went to OIRA for review in early August and could become public any day.

In a future post I’ll unpack what we might expect from a new rule, including in light of some litigation—Forcht Bank v. CFPB, brought by a Kentucky community bank alongside the Bank Policy Institute and the Kentucky Bankers Association, in which a federal judge last October enjoined enforcement of the 2024 rule pending the Bureau’s do-over—and some market developments that would resolve the issue with a fee-based system from data recipients to data providers, most notably JPMorgan’s deals to charge Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar, and Akoya for access.

For now, I’ll flag only that this is one of those issues that doesn’t divide partisans very clearly. That’s true in part because there is no David here, no Goliath. It’s not even obvious which approach better protects consumers or better promotes competition.

3. Dolly Parton and the ‘Pretty Darn Good’ Southern Church, New York Times, August 30, 2026

This Sunday at Church I was in an inner-city Philadelphia congregation and just loved how much this incredibly diverse group of people loved each other and are aware of each other’s day-to-day needs. It was fitting that one of the great spiritual leaders quoted from the day’s sermon was not from the Bible or Book of Mormon, or from current church leaders, but from Dolly Parton. (I heard from others throughout our region that Dolly Parton was an oft-cited person this Sunday.)

Here’s my confession. I don’t think I have ever knowingly put on a Dolly Parton track or record. But I have, like essentially everyone else in America it seems, come up in her cultural shadow.

What an icon, what an artist.

Of all the encomia I have read after her passing, I liked this one the most.

The academy, my professional home, is an overwhelmingly secular place. I have had a few great conversations over the years exploring why it is I remain a practicing Christian and Latter-day Saint given that I also was raised, so to speak, in that more secular space.

There are a lot of complex reasons for my continued commitment, some of which I have explored before (here, here, and here).

But this article resonated with me. The smallness of it is such an important component of this religious experience. It’s a global church, to be sure, and a wealthy one: this Bloomberg piece on the Church’s American real estate empire is pretty eye-opening, we’re hardly a small institution.

As I looked through the congregation on Sunday in Philadelphia and reflected on just how much these good people—from deep inside the hardest-off sections of Philadelphia from the most Utahn of Happy Valley suburbs from everything in between—are there for each other, I was struck by how much this global church has become a place of small communities. I was the beneficiary of growing up in such a congregation in Moore, Oklahoma, as was my wife in an even small congregation in Ellsworth, Maine, as are my boys in the little Pennsylvania hamlet of Jarrettown. In a world increasingly intermediated by all kinds of social-capital busting forces, I am glad for those “pretty darn good” institutions that continue to prevail.

4. Ride of the week: the International Mountain West.

Last week I rode 430 miles with my brother and a friend in Montana, Alberta, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho.

Truly, the most iconic riding of my life.

Regular readers will know that the original plan was to be in Switzerland, racing the Swiss epic. But when my brother broke his collarbone and reinjured some ligaments, that race was off. His orthopedist cleared him for road riding, though, and off we went.

Those miles changed me. I obviously have fallen, hard, for cycling in the last two years, but this was by far the biggest journey I have undertaken. I’ll write about it at more length on Friday, but for now I’ll add this photo from the Columbia Icefield and invite your caption. More to come – more thoughts on cycling, on life, more photos, more reflection on what this journey has been and where it goes from here.

Kevin Warsh, looking a bit airbrushed and ready for a new beginning.

Some links and commentary to end your Wednesday.

1. Kevin Warsh is struggling to escape his predecessor’s problems, The Economist, August 12, 2026

Last week I wrote that Kevin Warsh’s public speaking style makes him sound like he is “perennially running for student body president.” One …

Read more

Gentle readers, loyal readers, thank you for your patience these last months while my preferred cadence for this Substack—Monday Links, Wednesday deep dives into financial policy, and Friday personal essays—got hijacked by a project that has absorbed my attention for most of a decade.

Today, I submitted it to my editor at Norton, Dan Gerstle. It’s far t…

Read more

Donald Trump today signaled that he would accept the Supreme Court’s invitation to try, again, to become the first President in US history to fire a sitting Fed chair.

This effort, like his previous effort, will likely fail, but it’s a close call. The Fed — and with it, its hard-fought victor…

Read more

Kevin Warsh ain’t off to a great start, but markets should remember it’s still just his start.

Some links and thoughts to kick off your week. Don’t forget to subscribe and share access to PCB Central, back to its regular cadence after a book-finalizing-frenzy this summer. This week for paid readers I’ll write about the difference between supervision and …

Read more

Enough of my …

Read more

It’s Task Force time

Time for some PCB links. Here’s some of what I am reading, watching, and thinking about this week.

1. Federal Reserve announces the leadership and objectives of its task forces to advance the conduct of monetary policy, July 9, 2026

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh announced the composition of his “Task Forces.” It’s (mostly) better than I thoug…

Read more

My stars, can someone please take away his bronzer?

1. Colby Smith & Tony Romm, “Supreme Court Victory for Fed Still Leaves It Vulnerable to Trump,” New York Times, Jun 29, 2026

I wrote last week about the blockbuster Supreme Court opinion Trump v. Cook and how much it leaves unanswered. Right on time, President Trump is purportedly considering what, exac…

Read more

Forgive another rapid-fire article on the blockbuster opinion in Trump v. Cook. The more I think about it, the less I like it. More reactions, below.

Yesterday I gave you my initial reactions to Trump v. Cook, the most important judicial opinion on central banking in US history (okay, one of the only ones, but still…).

The opinion is, as I contemplate it a day later, a mess.

When read alongside Trump v. Slaughter, as the Court intended it to be done, we have an essentially incoherent view of what constitutes the “Fed exception” to the unitary executive theory.

There are so many problems, many of which the Alito and Barrett dissents highlight.

They include:

1. What constitutes appropriate “cause” for removal after Cook?

2. What kind of “notice and hearing” is required for such removal, and what possible difference in outcome would it make?

3. Are Fed Governors protected only in their roles as members of the FOMC? Or is the entire FOMC now unconstitutional because they mix executive and “monetary” roles?

4. Is there such a thing as a “monetary” role in the Constitution?

5. What evidence of wrongdoing must be provided to constitute “cause”?

6. Does context around a presidential campaign to harass a central bank into lowering interest rates matter?

These are off the top of my head. The Court makes head fakes toward some of them but mostly pushes them to the future.

Yesterday, I said that I think that this simply invites more meddling. And true enough, right after I hit “publish,” President Trump announced that he would “take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!”

Right now, only the thinnest reed offers the Fed legal protection against pure presidential domination. That reed is John Roberts’ seeming ability to see differences without distinction between the Fed’s Board of Governors and other agencies and Brett Kavanaugh’s willingness to be a judicial legislator because, as he sees it, monetary policy is just so much more important than other kinds of policy.

That’s not a very strong legal protection.

There was another way, though, that the Court should have taken, but didn’t.

Read more

We interrupt our usual Monday Links post for a quick-and-dirty reaction to the Supreme Court’s blockbuster opinion, Trump v. Cook. I’m responding to it as I read in real time, so watch this space after I have had a chance to chew and swallow this sharply-divided opinion.

Caveats noted, here are my eight reactions to this blockbuster opinion.

1. The Chief Justice writes for a five-person majority.

I would have bet my eye teeth that the three liberals were on Cook’s side, along with Kavanaugh. I was also confident that Barrett was on board. I thought Alito and Thomas would vote with Trump, mostly because my heuristic for them is, as with Sotomayor and Jackson, a partisan one. My only real question was Gorsuch and Roberts. The latter is the architect of the last twenty years of dismantling the bureaucratic executive, the former its biggest proponent, but both were cryptic in oral argument about what they were encountering in the present litigation.

I was wrong about half of these predictions. The final count was Roberts + Kavanaugh + the liberals for Cook, the rest again.

2. The case has always been easy or hard depending on what one thinks of the rest of the federal government.

That is to say, in Trump v. Slaughter, also issued today, the Court finally, fully embraced the theory of executive power with which it has long been flirting. After today, the President has plenary authority to dismiss any and all officers who exercise the executive function. To the extent that previous Court precedents — e.g., Humphrey’s Executor, which decided the current landscape 81 years ago - conflict with that determination, those precedents are overruled.

Easy peasy, as they say. Except what about the Fed? There’s the rub. If Fed’s Board of Governors—an administrative agency just like the Federal Trade Commission (the agency at stake in Slaughter), then it would follow that Cook is as easy a case.

But the Court concluded that the Fed is not the same as the FTC because — and here, I expect all of you to cue Fiddler on the Roof — “TRADITION!!”

That’s what makes this hard. I think as a historical matter this opinion makes almost no sense, with no serious effort to grapple with these historical differences. Opening the opinion as he does with a reference to the Bank of North America and the Banks of the United States tells us nothing about whether the President can fire a government employee who works at the regulator and supervisor of the modern-day analogue to those banks.

Instead, I think these two justices — those who voted against fired FTC commissioner Slaughter and voted for not-fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook — simply prefer one outcome and not the other. It’s judicial realpolitik.

3. Much of this opinion is technical, about justiciability and other topics of interest mostly just to lawyers.

The Government stipulated from the beginning that it didn’t think the Fed was the same as the FTC. It might not have wanted to make that argument originally, but the Court already signaled in its initial order in Cook that it wouldn’t make much of the contrary argument. So then the Solicitor General had to make this argument:

• The President can fire anybody for any or no reason in the executive branch, the Court has nothing it can say about any of that.

• Except for the Fed! We agree the Fed is different.

• Except that even for the Fed the Court can’t review the President’s reasons for firing a Fed official, which are up to him.

The Court concluded today that this argument collapses under its own weight. Point two and three are mutually inconsistent: they can’t both be true. So the second point is true, the third is not.

4. “For cause” is not a low bar. But it’s not a high bar either.

The Government wanted “for cause” to include any “concerns” about a person’s “integrity.”

This is also the view adopted by Justice Thomas, in dissent.

The Court rejected that view.

But Cook thought “for cause” in the Federal Reserve Act should incorporate the tradition of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance,” the standard identified in other statutes.

The Court purports, in Solomonic fashion, to reject both of these. It’s neither too low nor too high.

So where is it? “Having rejected both parties’ positions, we need not fully demarcate the contours of ‘cause’ today.”

The Court is now in the position of procrastinators everywhere: let’s let future SCOTUS handle that one.

5. The Court’s analysis of the Fed and central banking history does not inspire confidence.

Read more

Michelle Bowman has some splaining to do

Welcome back to PCB Central, a newsletter by legal scholar, financial historian, amateur powerlifter/triathlete, and Wharton professor Peter Conti-Brown.

This week I am packing in the training and editing ahead of a big conference for the youth of our church in Maryland where we will remember some history of the Mo…

Read more

Bill and Linda Cunningham, with me and Nikki on our wedding day 21 years ago

Welcome back to PCB Central, a newsletter by legal scholar, financial historian, amateur powerlifter/triathlete, and Wharton professor Peter Conti-Brown.

This week I am in Utah for the wedding of a beloved niece — almost like a daughter, a very special weekend to celebrate her ma…

Read more

Welcome back to PCB Central, a newsletter by legal scholar, financial historian, amateur powerlifter/triathlete, and Wharton professor Peter Conti-Brown.

It’s FOMC week. And perhaps the week when the US Supreme Court will announce its opinion in Trump v. Cook. It’s a big week for Fed watchers!

But I’m coming off the best race of my life so nothing can ge…

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to PCB Central, a newsletter by legal scholar, financial historian, amateur powerlifter/triathlete, and Wharton professor Peter Conti-Brown.

Race weekend again, my second 70.3 of the year.

I am not sure what I am feeling. Excited understates it. Driven is only part of the picture. Frisson gets closest.

This newsletter is reader supported. This post is paid, after a tease; paid subscribers also get my back catalogue of hundreds of essays on a variety of topics, narrations of many of them starting in 2026, personal tips on whether you too should invest in real estate, and as always my deep personal gratitude. Subscribe below, tell your friends.

Subscribe now

Share

1. Jill Biden’s memoir is terrible

I couldn’t finish it. The Bidens—and I mean that to include the members of the Administration who inflicted a decrepit Joe Biden on the rest of us in 2024, giving us back a worse form of Trumpism—have simply no concept of what they did to us. The book meanders between the completely banal (no dress is too trivial to avoid long commentary, no wife of a head of state outside Ms. Biden’s circle of “dear friends”) to the obtuse (she speaks so lovingly of her pets but skips the part where their German shepherds bit Secret Service agents over twenty times and put one in the hospital) to the truly tragic (they are in total, complete denial about how ill-suited for reelection Joe Biden was). I hated it.

2. Jay Clayton is so vastly better as Director of National Intelligence than Bill Pulte

When I wrote last week that I believed Republicans had it in them to oppose the pultification of national intelligence, I was sincere. And I was right. Jay Clayton is a resounding success of Republican opposition to Trump’s lowest appointment impulses.

3. I would not have voted for Graham Platner in the Democratic Primary and would not vote for him in the general election

Maine is my spiritual home. I own property there. Nikki is a born-and-raised Mainer. We spend significant time each year there as a family; I will likely retire there and will be buried there.

So while I am not a Maine resident, I’m as close as the non-residents come. For that reason, I took more than a passing interest in the Platner debacle. I think the accusations against him are serious enough to be disqualifying. I would not have voted for him in the Democratic primary (if I were a Democrat). And in the general election, I would vote for Susan Collins. She voted to convict Trump of the House charges after January 6^th, which is the litmus test for my support of any Republican.

Those who support Platner despite his character flaws have some explaining to do about whether they disapprove of these character flaws in the Republicans they hate. If not, it’s all partisan noise, not worth the time of anyone outside of those silly scrums.

4. Jeanine Pirro continues her silly tricks with the awesome power of government.

This time in subpoenas against banks for “debanking” clients, in implicit accusation that the banks committed fraud by these actions.

Nonsense on stilts. What a tragedy for the DOJ and the weaponization of the state against political opponents. Some Republicans whose judgment I generally trust rationalized their support for Trump in 2024 in protest of the same supposed treatment of Trump by the Biden Administration. I am completely unconvinced of the parallel, but hope now they see this wolf as a wolf. If the Dems brought knives to the political fight, Trump has brought nukes.

5. Next week’s Fed meeting is going to be a spicy one

Warsh claimed to see past his former hostility toward low interest rates in the name of Trump’s wise policies. This flip turned me from a supporter to a critic.

Now, with inflation at a three-year high—well above the path to target—Warsh will either rediscover his principles or perform some very embarrassing contortions. Grab your bucket of popcorn.

6. I can’t get local coaches to respond to email

The first time a local swim coach ignored emails for weeks then responded with apology and then ignored more I thought “well, not everyone is good at email.” The second time, I thought “wow, I have bad luck.”

I’m now on my fifth effort to get a swim or mtb coach, and I’ll say, email is not their strong suit. I have a great cycling coach, but continue trusting ole Claude and YouTube for the rest.

7. The Chronicles of Narnia hold up beautifully

I’m halfway through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with my 7 and 10 year olds. They are completely riveted, as am I. It’s my fifth or sixth reading. The scene where Aslan liberates Eustace from the dragon is so moving to me.

8. There are nine political parties, not two

This Pew report is fabulous. Which political party are you? And, if you had to guess, which political party am I?

9. Real estate as an investment is a wild ride.

In 2025 Nikki and I bought a second home, in Maine.

It has been, ahem, expensive. We’re playing a long game. This is the first thing I have ever bought that I expect to own until I am dead. Let’s just say, though, that as a financial investment I would have been better off leaving it all in index funds.

10. My third Ironman 70.3 is on Sunday

I am very excited for this, if the weather holds.

I am faster on bike and run than I have ever been. Swimming continues to be adorable. Maybe one day I will crack that code.

Last time I predicted a sub 6 hour race, and wasn’t even close. I had a big expensive mechanical failure, so that wasn’t great, but that wasn’t all.

This time I am just going to focus on the experience of it. The love of the physiological integration of that many systems engaged over those 5-7 hours.

11. We are in a golden age on reports on what ails the humanities

This one is maybe my favorite so far. Very even handed, by celebrated and rigorous practitioners of these arts.

I think the basic conclusion is sound: “Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

I am deeply skeptical of scholars who use their expertise predominantly (or exclusively) in favor of partisan or controversial political projects. I wish they would stop these efforts. They are the internal cause of the collapse of public support for higher education. If we lose that support, we have lost something very precious.

12. Elizabeth I by Helen Castor

I read this book this week and loved it. It’s a skinny little 109 pages and so full of clarity and color. It is the model of lean biography.

13. Why the Fed book is so hard to finish

I have had a full manuscript of my book, The Federal Reserve: An American History, for six weeks. I am only in 1929 in my revisions. I think the reason this is so hard is that this history is a game of such mammoth exclusions, so much left on the cutting room floor, that I grieve the excisions and judge harshly the inclusions. But I will finish this. It is my consuming professional goal.

14. 21^st anniversary

Yesterday Nikki and I celebrated our 21^st anniversary. I am more in love with her today than I was on that day in 2005. It is the relationship that defines my life.

Read more

Two happy brothers having just completed the best race of our lives.

Welcome back to PCB Central, a newsletter by legal scholar, financial historian, amateur powerlifter/triathlete, and Wharton professor Peter Conti-Brown.

One June race down, one to go. This weekend I will race my third half Ironman, this one in Maryland, running the same course I will do in September for the full 140.6 mile glory. This is my dress rehearsal. I’ll be all out, am aiming for a sub-6 hour performance, but will be happy with anything. Stay tuned, keep me honest. A 6-hour performance will be an outlandishly impressive jump from my previous, but I like being outlandish. Just look at my bike collection.

This newsletter is reader supported. This post is paid, after a tease; paid subscribers also get my back catalogue of hundreds of essays on a variety of topics, narrations of many of them starting in 2026 (including this one, available here), personal tips—quite literally—on how to grow wealth responsibly, and as always my deep personal gratitude. Subscribe below, tell your friends.

Subscribe now

Share

1. Tara Siegel Bernard, Customers Are Giving Billions to Scammers. Tellers Are Intervening, New York Times, Jun 7, 2026

In the initial years of the federal experiment with bank supervision, federal bank examiners did not quite know what to do with fraud. Initially, Comptroller of the Currency Hugh McCulloch (1863–1865) urged Congress to legislate “that the failure of a national bank be declared prima facie fraudulent.” Afterall, how could a bank fail except through the fraudulence of its officers and directors?

In time, however, bank supervision flew the white flag in protecting banks and their stakeholders from fraudulent behavior. “It is not to be supposed that the short time usually spent in the examination of a national bank will be sufficient in all cases, to detect bad management or defalcations,” Comptroller John Jay Knox Jr. (1872–1884) admitted in 1873, declining to suppose what his predecessors had earlier heralded as a key benefit of bank supervision.

Something changed in the middle of the 20^th century. Bank supervisors had declared victory against those bankers who, through fraudulence, would threaten their stakeholders by shoving a bank into insolvency. In the early postwar years, the FDIC gained a reputation for exactness and criminal referrals that populated the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana with an entire cadre of convicted banker-embezzlers. Some of the FDIC’s “more humorous-minded staff” called the group “the FDIC Club.” The club included an Indiana banker who cashed $200,000 in fake checks for his friends “just to be a good fellow.” Another, a banker from New York, stole $110,000 from his bank “to buy hats.” Some bought alfalfa farms, some bought sewer pipes, some bought apple orchards, and some bought lakeside cottages in Wisconsin. But when the bank supervisors (at the FDIC and elsewhere) discovered these excesses, the fact that these funds were now backstopped by the federal government made an enormous difference. Where previous examiners bemoaned their inability to track fraud through supervision, the transformation of “defalcation” to the federal crime of bank fraud meant that these con artists were no longer a concern for the county sheriff. They were for the Feds.

Ever since, bank examiners and bankers have played the game of cat-and-mouse with the fraudsters who seek to separate people from their money. One classic example is the “Bank Examiner Game”—the story of which Sean Vanatta and I document in our history of bank supervision, from which the paragraph above is derived. In that “game,” a fraudster poses as a bank examiner and recruits his victim to help thwart a bigger crime by the bank tellers who are stealing money from the bank. The withdrawals are made to expose the corrupt teller, and then the bank examiner disappears into the night.

I was reminded of this story when I read the Times piece linked above. The problem, as in the 1960s, is the social engineering that fraudsters conduct. They are addressing a real problem. People—the elderly, the recently bereaved, the get-rich-quick folks—need something, an inside angle, an opportunity to help, just some physical company.

That’s what makes this multibillion-dollar industry—bank fraud—so attractive. There’s a lonely person willing to hear them out retiring every minute.

The antidote? I’m not exactly sure. But one path is to make sure the people in your life who might be amenable to hearing out the fraudsters are getting these hard problems addressed in other ways.

Call your mother or grandmother, is what I am saying.

2. Saleha Mohsin and Catarina Saraiva, Waller’s Push to Shake Up Fed Stirs Fears Over Regional Autonomy, Bloomberg, Jun 3, 2026

This piece caught my attention for a few reasons.

The basic fight, as I have discussed before, is that Fed Governor Christopher Waller, who is himself an alumnus of the Federal Reserve Banks and is now the Fed Governor chairing the Reserve Bank Oversight Committee, wants to make some big changes in the way that the Banks conduct their business. In his view, it’s about economizing on the people’s money, providing the same services that Reserve Banks have always provided at a cheaper cost. The path here is through economies of scale, by giving up Reserve Bank autonomy in some cases remote from policy work—IT, HR, backoffice stuff—and reducing head counts and overhead costs through that centralization.

But that centralization, in Waller’s view, won’t affect Reserve Bank autonomy, so there’s nothing to worry about. Have our cake and eat it, too—easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

I don’t buy it. That is, I think reducing Reserve Bank autonomy is unavoidable and virtually tautological when you reduce budgets and head counts, in part because such control is itself a function of that autonomy.

That said, I very much buy it when it comes to the overall principle. I simply don’t agree that Reserve Bank autonomy is a sacred cow of central banking. Virtually no other central bank systems, including those with comparably strong records in policy, have the “system” that we have. There is a problem with so much governance incoherence, with an inability to know precisely whom we must hold responsible when things go awry.

Take for example one black eye in Powell’s otherwise strong legacy: the astonishingly large number of central bankers who involved themselves in financial improprieties in the last six years.

Whose fault is that? The individual central bankers, to be sure, but who can fire a misbehaving central banker who—like Atlanta’s Raphael Bostic—repeatedly violate the code of conduct through what we can only charitably describe as woeful indifference to that code?

I think the answer should be the Board of Governors. But if that’s so, then it becomes clear that the Reserve Banks are subordinate to the Board of Governors. Are they, though? Or does autonomy mean they are coequals?

It’s one of the jumbles that has been with us since 1913, diminished but not eliminated in 1935, and still an issue almost a century later.

3. Quentin Fottrell, ‘I have no experience with investing’: I inherited $2,000. I’m 42 with two children. What should I do with this money?, Wall Street Journal, Jun 8, 2026

From time to time close friends and family members ask me for financial advice. I welcome it. I think practicing sound financial hygiene is one of the most empowering and important behaviors any of us can engage.

Here’s my advice: get rich slow.

Read more

Read more

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Peasant Wedding (c. 1567), which makes me think of community

Welcome back to PCB Central, a newsletter by legal scholar, financial historian, amateur powerlifter/triathlete, and Wharton professor Peter Conti-Brown.

I’m delighted that my brother and niece are in town this weekend. My brother is here to race with me the Highlands Gran Fondo. Well, the Medio Fondo—he just broke his collarbone in April and so we are dialing it back a bit. Our shakeup ride this morning was glorious, meant to be zone 2, but the two of us together cannot help be push each other, so we’ll see how this goes.

This newsletter is reader supported. This post is paid, after a tease; paid subscribers also get my back catalogue of hundreds of essays on a variety of topics, narrations of many of them starting in 2026 (including this one, available here, and I’ll say: you’ll want to listen to this one), personal tips on how you too can find your people, and as always my deep personal gratitude. Subscribe below, tell your friends.

Share

Subscribe now

One of the most unsettling experiences of my life was leaving Moore, Oklahoma and arriving as a scholarship student on Harvard campus as a freshman in the fall of 1999. I was completely at sea. The apparatus that had given me identity in Oklahoma—motorcycle-driving classical guitarist, hilarious shenaniganizer, smartest kid in the room—were all stripped from me. The motorcycle stayed behind. The classical guitar didn’t, but I realized almost immediately that what passed as musical excellence in Moore barely qualified as musical competence in Cambridge.

I thought I was very funny, but in the performative space of get-to-know-you freshman orientation and thereafter, I could barely muster a coherent sentence I felt so crippled by insecurity, never mind a punch line. Much of humor requires a critical distance from your subject, an ability to see text, context, subtext, and pretext all at once. I was, socially, one nostril above water. I couldn’t tell the difference between where I was and what was funny about it.

And the smartest kid in the room? Not even close. I was a star math student at Moore High, but tested into intro calculus at Harvard—a class I had already taken. I took four years of Spanish in high school, but tested again into the 101 course. I won the award for best English student, but only just made the line above remedial writing courses. That harrowing week of taking placement tests left me humiliated and unsure. I was stumbling half-blindfolded in a room that was brightly lit and filled with people with their eyes wide open.

It was here that I first started taking seriously the idea that, to survive in that hostile place, I needed to find “my people.” These are the people with whom I no longer had to pretend, with whom I could be unafraid, with whom I could be myself.

In 1999, I defaulted quickly to Harvard Mormons as my people.

It was easy to do. I was a multigenerational Latter-day Saint, after all. My own individual spiritual affiliation with the religion was more in flux. I didn’t feel strongly about the historical claims of Mormonism and have never (even now) found theism easy to muster. But I spoke this language fluently, I knew the touchstones and shibboleths, and could view the texts, subtexts, contexts, and pretexts well.

And so I elected to push into this world while simultaneously withdrawing from the general Harvard scene. Unlike most freshmen finding their way, trying on hats, play-acting at this or that identity, struggling with their own insecurities directly and concretely, I retreated into familiarity. I spent the year mostly in the company of incredible Harvard Mormons—including, I will say, one Nikki Conti, as well as two college friends who remain some of my best in life.

I largely missed out on the rest. I am in touch today with precisely zero non-Mormon friends from freshman year. With effort I think I could maybe add two people to that list.

The Master Status

Later in college I would learn something about this process of social identity formation in a couple of sociology classes I took. Mormonism was what mid-20^th century sociologist Everett Hughes called a “master status,” or a “status, in addition to its specifically determining traits, a complex of auxiliary characteristics expected of its incumbents.” Hughes is making an argument about identity as it imposes itself externally: his example is a Black physician in the 1940s whose identity as Black dominates his professional identity as a doctor. But the idea took root in my mind more internally, the way we orient ourselves to various competing statuses that we might select as we move through the world.

I left Harvard at the end of my freshman year to serve a two-year mission in Portugal and Cape Verde, the island nation in West Africa. I loved it. The halting affiliational questions about Mormonism were mostly resolved at that point for me. On my return, though, I was a 21-year-old sophomore who had just spent two years living very simply among parts of society that, shall we say, do not traditionally walk the paths of Harvard Yard.

My friends, such as I had them, from freshman year were now all seniors as I tried to remember what problem sets and term papers were. More than that, the mission made me 21 going on 40. I was a world apart. I spent most of the rest of college devoted to the study of Romance languages, economic sociology, and Nikki Conti (who had promoted me from best friend to boyfriend to fiancé).

No regrets. Maybe some regrets.

It sounds from the tone of this description that I regret this path. That’s a hard word to put on a big part of history. It’s only 20% correct.

Meeting and marrying Nikki, focusing on that relationship as I did in the zero-sum obstacle course of college time management, was the single best thing that has ever happened to me. Today, my “master status,” to abuse the term, is not as a Mormon, but as a Conti-Brown. Nothing matters to me more, nothing gives my life more meaning. If that single-minded focus in 1999 (and thereafter) was necessary to secure that identity, then my 20% regrets fall to zero.

As I think about my sons getting close to college, though, I think that that exclusive identity priority wasn’t the only course. There were other options. In my fear of mediocrity and in a budding self-loathing of one who feels exquisite difference in the midst of elite institutions, I opted to pursue what was safest. Therein lies the regret. I wish in college I had taken a few more risks.

After college, through law school at Stanford, law practice as a federal law clerk and as an appellate attorney, a PhD program at Princeton, life as a professor at Wharton, I have had more opportunities to both retreat into comfort and to extend myself into experimentation.

Retreating is so much easier. It is also so much worse.

When faced with that identity option—retreat into sameness and familiarity, experiment into difference—I have often wondered about these tradeoffs and am led to existential questions.

Who am I trying to become? Who are my people, those likeliest to help me get there? More generally, what is my master status, internal and external? What are the benefits of social and intellectual affiliation with others similarly situated? What are the costs? How do I structure my identity formation dynamically so that I can grow and change in my quest to experience life deeply without losing touch with the most important of principles that animate me so completely?

Are bankers my people?

Recently, I had another experience with master status and identity that brought some of these questions home to me in a profound way.

The nature of my professional life is such that I get asked to make speeches to professionals in financial services on this or that aspect of banking, central banking, the macroeconomy, and the like. I love these experiences, and not (just) because they are lucrative. Public speaking for me is an art and a science. If there is one comparative advantage I have as a professional, it’s this: holding the attention of a crowd as I tell stories at the intersection of the technical and the human.

A few weeks ago I was in such an auditorium with senior financial services professionals from around the world. We were talking shop. These were experts, I am an expert, and we were thinking hard about where banking is, where we are headed, and how to make sense of topics as varied as shifting winds in bank supervision, threats to the global macroeconomy, banking and the AI revolution, the difference between technological change and technological fads, stablecoin and crypto asset prices, and much else. I was in my element. Over the course of many hours we came nowhere near to exhausting the passion and attention we could pay to these topics.

I realized as I left the day’s events that these were in fact my people. That very notion would have surprised and perhaps scandalized 1999 Peter Brown. I was a vegan socialist then, so the migration to big-game hunting, protein-pounding, banking scholar was not in my crystal ball. I also found people with money, or close to money, impossibly intimidating. Harvard was full of such people. I ran in the other direction when I encountered them.

Not now. These thoughtful and creative financial services professionals were thinking about the same kinds of things that I think about. We knew each others’ touchstones and shibboleths, we spoke a similar shorthand, we could riff and dance in a way that felt funny, intimate, intellectually creative. I understand their texts, subtexts, pretexts, and context. And they were paying me a princely sum to be there, to lead them through the days’ agenda. I had a grand time and thought about ways I might collaborate with that group further.

Other kinds of my people

I was thinking these thoughts on the drive away from the meeting, but I wasn’t headed home. I was going to the church in downtown Philadelphia, where I had a series of other meetings that I needed to attend.

Read more

Read more