Governmental Activity in the Financial Field

Professor Gras has asked me to talk today on government regulation in the field of Finance. When he first mentioned the matter it seemed to me a most stimulating suggestion. The more I considered it, however, the more difficult the assignment appeared. The more I thought about it the more the subject seemed to be made up of a large number of topics relatively unrelated to each other. Management of insurance companies can hardly be treated in the same paragraph with the divorce of security affiliates from commercial banks, and competitive bidding has little in common with measures designed to protect bank depositors. While many of the particular segments of this subject possess great interest in their own right and deserve careful individual treatment, they are for the most part technical and cannot be dealt with adequately in the time at my disposal. Moreover, they are in many instances special subjects. By this I mean that they have wholly different backgrounds, that their internal logics are dissimilar, and that the kinds of knowledge needed to see each in its proper perspective are quite disassociated. The problem is to knit this compartmentalized subject together so as, on the one hand, to see it as a whole, and on the other hand, to avoid somewhat empty generalities.