Understanding the rationale behind Eccles’s ambitions also holds lessons for the current moment, revealing just how powerful and malleable bank supervision can be, why the industry’s current effort to remake supervision could backfire, and why those taking up arms to defend supervision may come to regret that decision. Conti-Brown and Vanatta show that supervision is a powerful tool. It can and often has been used to meaningfully enhance the health of banks and the banking system. Yet they further show that it can and has been used to serve other agendas as well, potentially making it very attractive to an administration looking to deploy such tools in new and sometimes self-serving ways…

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