Episode 330 – Money, Power, and the People with Christopher Shaw

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is a guest that many people on the team have been trying for quite some time to get me to have on the show.

And as luck would have it, he was courteous enough and very gracious enough to accept our invitation.

His name is Christopher Shaw, and Christopher Shaw is a historian and the author of Money, Power and the People, which explores America’s long fight to democratize banking. He has a PhD from UC Berkeley and he writes on financial reform, populism and economic inequality.

And with that, let me welcome my guest, Christopher Shaw. Welcome to the show, sir.

Christopher Shaw:
00:01:26

Glad to be here. Thank you for extending the invitation.

Steve Grumbine:
00:01:30

You know, it is absolutely my pleasure. But I’m sure that the people on our team are going to be even happier. They absolutely swear by your book, and in particular, Money, Power and [the] People.

I know that you have another book out. It’s on postal banking, I believe.

Christopher Shaw:
00:01:45

I’ve written and researched a lot on postal banking.

And then that ties into other work I’ve done on trying to maintain and preserve the post office as a government service and not go down the road to privatization.

Steve Grumbine:
00:01:59

And my goodness, do we need to stop privatizing things? And I think that is really kind of the essence of the book that we want to really focus on today, which is, in fact, Money, Power and the People.

You know, I was able to get this book, and I told you offline, I’ve got three copies of this thing because I was trying to get to an audiobook. I bought the Kindle version, I got the hardback version, and then I went and bought it on Google so I could listen to the computer AI voice read it to me.

And I gotta tell you, it is absolutely mind blowing, the level of rigor that you put into the historical underpinnings of the financial system.

And some of the names that you hear, they’re names that people probably heard in other history classes and civics classes throughout high school and college.

But putting them in their context, putting them in their timeframe and understanding the battle, if you will, within the banking system and watching the fears and the panics and the bank runs and understanding all the problems that rank and file Americans at that time, agriculturalists, farmers, workers, unionists, et cetera, had, with the extreme disparity in terms of control and power that the banking cartels had back at that time, really makes this work you’ve done incredibly important.

There’s so many misnomers about what the banking system is, what it is not, and how we got to where we are today that I think your work is absolutely indispensable. What got you to pursue this? What was the impetus for digging into the history of banking?

Christopher Shaw:
00:03:41

Well, that’s a long question because I worked on it for many years. But one of the reasons is I actually started it before the 2008 financial crisis.

And then when that came along, it made it seem like what I was working on was all the more relevant. So I was interested in movements towards economic democracy.

I was interested in American history. I was interested in the labor movement. I was interested in the populists of the late 19th century, who eventually became associated with the presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan. And you had the whole battle of the standards, the debate over the gold standard versus bimetallism, backing money by silver and gold.

And it was clear to me that there was a long-standing interest earlier in the history in these financial questions in a way that just wasn’t there in the 1990s or the early 2000s. And I started looking into the primary source material from back in that time.

So looking at these magazines and newspapers and other items, and you saw there was this whole discourse and debate and language around banking and bankers that just wasn’t there in 2005, 2006, when you heard people talking about politics, they weren’t talking about this at all. And at the same time, it was obvious that Wall Street and banks and bankers had tremendous power in 2005 and 2006.

So it seemed to me like there was a real disparity between the power of banking and the lack of political discussion or debate about it 20 years ago, which is when I started on this project. Yet I could go back further in American history.

And at the same time, back then, the power of bankers was great, but there was a real discussion and debate and challenge and struggle over these issues.

And so I just got interested in, okay, “What did this look like back in that time when you had this politics around banking, this banking politics, and also, why is it that we don’t have it now today? Why is it not there?” So delving into that question and pursuing it, that’s how I ended up eventually publishing the book.

Steve Grumbine:
00:05:43

You brought up a few things in that comment right there that I think are really important to draw out. And one of the things that I was questioning myself as I was reading it was is this kind of, I don’t want to say in a fishbowl, but we focus on Modern Monetary Theory here.

So we are literally talking about fiscal policy and monetary policy and understanding the fact that maybe we don’t really live in the democracy we think we live in, and the outcomes are not really looking like the outcomes that you say you want or I say I want. You’re wondering, where’s the agency? Where’s the knowledge? And you talk to people about how money gets spent into existence through law.

You talk to them about the various plumbing elements of the system, and you realize it’s a niche subject.

I don’t know whether this is by design because society has been bread and circused away from caring about things like this, or whether it’s just grown to be so complicated intentionally that people say, “I just, I’ll never be able to understand it.”

But to see the way it was then at the turn of the century, and to see so many people, even from rural America, what we would call the flyover states, the Midwest and the prairie lands and so forth, being passionately concerned with the role of banking and to see them really dialed in, I was questioning, “Is this just like a microcosm or is this the real thing? Is this how everybody was?” And then I read some of the other elements of people were saying, “Well, you know, this is really meant for us bankers. We’re the smart ones. You guys wouldn’t know what you’re doing anyway. It’s way too complicated for you illiterates
over there.”

And I think that that mindset has pervaded even modern society today where people just think it’s too much for them to understand.

So for me, watching the way you wrote this and understanding this is a historical recount of the way that not only the Federal Reserve System came, but how they dealt with bank runs and how the bankers themselves warred with each and then came together and warred with industry and some of the power plays.

I mean, in particular the one, I believe it was a copper magnate that basically got pushed out of not only his own industry, but then pushed out of banking altogether.

Just the power plays and all of the barons of the time, you know, it felt really, really, I don’t want to say frightening, but it felt near and dear and yet a totally historical context of something of yesteryear. Help me understand how that kind of plays into today. You’re looking back at history, and you see it happening today.

What have we forgotten about the past?

Christopher Shaw:
00:08:12

Yeah. So I think one thing that’s important or helpful to keep in mind here is a lot of times people say, “Today we’re living in a second Gilded Age.” Right?

And that points to the fact that there was a first Gilded Age, and that is the period after the Civil War. You know, really, you could draw it all the way up till the Great Depression.

And this being a time when there’s a lot of inequality, people are questioning how well our democracy is functioning, given the disparities that are out there, the inequality that is out there, the lack of power and rights of just the ordinary citizen. And the gilded part, though, being, if you look at the surface, I mean, it was also a time of a lot of economic growth.

There’s great fortunes being made. But the question of who is benefiting from this, how it is or is not being shared, is right there. And so that was that time period.

And at that time, the industries that are driving things are the steel industry, the railroads, automobiles, later on. Right? But it looks a lot like today, where we were facing these same questions about inequality, about our democracy, about the power of oligarchy.

Oligarchy. There’s a big discussion about using the term oligarchy.

Let me tell you, Americans a hundred years ago were talking about oligarchy, and they understood perfectly well what it means. So Bernie Sanders is using oligarchy, and it’s a term that applies to both the first Gilded Age and the second Gilded Age.

So these are time periods where the kinds of issues and questions that we need to address are very similar ones. So I think that’s an important point just to put out there.

And then, of course, banking is very significant to how this economy is operating and what its problems are. It’s right there at the center of the capitalist financial system. And that was true in the first Gilded Age and again in the second Gilded Age.

And I would say that when I started working on this book 20 years ago, it wasn’t even a niche issue in terms of people being concerned about these financial issues. It wasn’t even niche. Now, thankfully, it’s something people actually talk about. Right? I mean, there’s like a podcast like yours, for instance.

So we’re getting back to where people are curious about this, informed about this question of banking and money, and have an understanding of why it’s important, but it doesn’t look at all like it did during the first Gilded Age. And I think that is a hard thing for us to wrap our minds around.

And that’s why history is important, because people say, “The past is a foreign country.”

And yeah, it’s kind of mind blowing frankly, how engaged and well informed so many working people were on what we consider to be mind-numbing, incredibly complex issues that we are told we can’t understand and we should just leave to the bankers. Well, they were told the same thing a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, but they didn’t listen.

And the results were the reforms that are discussed in the book.

Steve Grumbine:
00:10:53

I’m a sucker for good historical stories. And you laid out the battleground for each of these micro-fights.

I don’t think people understand how many incredibly small fights were going on that were really mounting to big issues. And I don’t think people understand what banking was like back at the turn of the century in the 1900s. The idea of a bank run today is not a thing.

And the reason that it’s not really a thing…

I’m sure that there are ways where you see with like the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and things like that, where you see them have the wrong asset positions and the wrong investment positions where they have long-term savings and they’re not really planning for short-term interest rates to mess with their balance sheet, but it’s not the same as it was then.

Can you start us off here with the bank runs and the positional battles with bimetallism and gold dating back to, let’s say post-Civil War, leading up to the Progressive Era?

Christopher Shaw:
00:11:55

Right.

It looks very different the way that these systems worked back then in terms of the banking system at that time, we would consider it to be today very lightly regulated. There is no Federal Reserve until 1914. And the Federal Reserve is really sort of figuring out how to do its job for a while, for years after its founding, there is no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and there’s no FDIC until 1934. And so you talked about bank runs. What this means is
that this was something that people were keeping an eye out for and worried about all the time.

Anytime you put your money into the bank, you had to be a little worried that that bank could fall. They could close their doors and you could end up losing a great portion or all of your savings if that occurred. And the thing is that there’s bank failures that happened on isolated cases on a rather consistent basis.

And then when there’s an economic crash or a depression, then you get a flurry of bank failures. And so that kind of instability in the system it was just part of the system at that time.

And it meant not just that you’re losing your hard-won nest egg. Your savings are risk and in jeopardy, but then also when banks started failing, it could either start an economic depression or it could make one that was already underway worse. And this was a regular occurrence as well, where at that time you had, these days we use the word recession, and in part that makes sense because now we have some kind of a welfare state. I mean, we have some way to look after people when these kinds of economic hard times come along. That just wasn’t the case at that time.

I mean, if you’re out of a job, you don’t have income. It was a very scary position to be in. And there were economic depressions on a regular basis. There was a major one that started in 1873.

There was a major one that started in 1893. There was a major one that Started in 1907. There was a serious one in 1921.

And then there’s the big one, of course, that starts in 1929 and leads to what we call the Great Depression. And so the banking system was again right at a major issue in terms of its stability and its ability to function during these hard times.

But even when times were good, you could see banks go by the wayside, they could close their doors. A lot of the time this had to do with just white-collar crime because they weren’t being monitored the way that they ought to be.

And during good times, you could get away maybe with a certain amount of white-collar crime.

But when the economy headed south, when the economy hits a downturn, all those problems in the bank suddenly become a serious issue and could lead the bank to go belly up. So a real lack of government regulation and government oversight in banking at the time was just part of how the banking system operated.

Steve Grumbine:
00:14:39

One of the stories you tell in the very early parts of the book are Pretty Boy Floyd. And I just thought that was really special.

I liked the way you added it in there because I think anybody that would have heard names like Pretty Boy Floyd would just think gangster and so forth without really having the context of the time. Can you tell a little bit about the Pretty Boy Floyd story? I think that was just amazing.

Christopher Shaw:
00:15:02

Sure. So Pretty Boy Floyd is part of a group at the very depths of the Depression in the early 1930s.

You get a bunch of outlaws, bandits who become national celebrities or regional celebrities. So it’s people like you have Machine Gun Kelly. You have Bonnie and Clyde. Most famously, you have John Dillinger.

And these are people who are out there and committing crimes. And one of the crimes that is being committed is bank robberies. And Pretty Boy Floyd really specialized in robbing banks.

And he was mostly centered in Oklahoma. That’s where he was from. And he becomes a hero. He’s like what E. J. Hobsbawm would call a social bandit: where he’s robbing the banks, but he’s also to a certain extent acting like Robin Hood, where he is passing along money to these impoverished people during the
Great Depression. He would take time to burn mortgage documentation sometimes during bank robberies.

At least this is all the legend that grows around him.

And so as a result, he becomes sort of a beloved figure because he’s somebody who’s striking back against the banks that are failing and stealing people’s savings, that are foreclosing on your farm or on your home. And it seems like he’s someone out there who’s getting back at them and is also sharing the proceeds of his banditry. And so he becomes a major hero.

The FBI does catch up with him and kills him in a shootout. And then when the funeral occurs back home in Oklahoma, there’s a huge outpouring of people there, and he’s treated like kind of a fallen hero.

And so that, I think, speaks to the level of criticism of the banking system that existed at that time.

Steve Grumbine:
00:16:46

You had another story there in the beginning, and these stories are fun, folks. When you read the book, and you will read the book, you need to read the book.

I can’t remember which guy it was, whether it was JP Morgan or who it was that died. And the church, the priest or whoever it was doing the ceremony said, “You know, he was a great banker, but he was not a great man.”

And the idea of these folks were literally demonic. I mean, they were just straight up cutthroat, horrible people. And I don’t think that that opinion of bankers has really changed.

Christopher Shaw:
00:17:17

Steve Grumbine:
00:17:18

Honestly, I think that they’re probably almost as hated as lawyers nowadays. Tell me a little bit about the barons of the time. Let’s go back in history and really look at who these big names were.

And some of these names folks you’re going to recognize immediately. But let’s talk about some of those folks that made up that cartel.

Christopher Shaw:
00:17:38

Well, the big one, as you said, was J.P. Morgan, Sr.  J. Pierpont Morgan. He’s the big one.

Another sometimes referred to as a triumvirate at the time was George Baker, who gave a lot of money to Harvard Business School and is perhaps best remembered for that these days. And then James Stillman, who created what is today called Citi, you know, Citibank. Back then, the National City Bank, he created that.

So they were the big bankers. And banking was very much concentrated in New York City at that time, as it still is, but even more so in certain respects.

But above them all was Morgan. He was the dominant figure. And the way that he really becomes that is they did commercial banking, right?

There were people with bank accounts at these banks. But the other thing that they’re doing is they’re underwriting stock issues.

And for Morgan especially, he gets involved in basically taking over large corporations, starting with railroads, but then it expands beyond that over time; reorganizing them and making them turn a profit or more of a profit, and then selling equity in them. And the main way he does this is by making it so that they have what Warren Buffett refers to as moats, right? Monopolies.

So he’s the man behind U.S. Steel, United States Steel, which is the first billion-dollar corporation.

And what they do is they just go around and try to buy as many steel producers as they can and then bring them all together under this one corporation. So that process comes to be called Morganization.

And so at that time, in many ways, when you talk about these big bankers, it’s not just that they control a large bank with types of vast financial resources. It’s that they also, through those banks have a lot of influence on major corporations that are not even part of the financial sector. Right?

They’re manufacturing. They’re transportation. And so in a lot of ways it’s like New York City at that time and especially Manhattan with these major titans of finance there.

It’s like the command center of capitalism is how a lot of people at the time are coming to understand it. All roads in the end seem to lead to the house of Morgan, which was J.P. Morgan’s bank.

Steve Grumbine:
00:19:51

One of the things that I think is badly misunderstood, maybe it’s understood just fine, but maybe the solutions aren’t clear, is the troubles that led up to the Federal Reserve Act and the famous meetings out there at Jekyll Isle that libertarians have run off with and created an entire different thing. But that whole era, there was a lot going on and you document it in outrageously great detail. I’m blown away.

The amount of detail that you put into this is breathtaking.

Can you talk about the stuff that JP Morgan and the rest of these guys were haggling over within this banking politics and the fights, the various fight were going on leading up to the creation of the Federal Reserve?

Christopher Shaw:
00:20:35

Right? Yeah. Jekyll Island looms large, and it is an important event in the creation of the Federal Reserve. But there’s a lot of backstory beyond that.

There’s that one book that a lot of people have read. What is it called? The Creature that Came From Jekyll Island or something? It’s like referring to, like a 1950s drive-in 3D movie kind of title.

The Federal Reserve did not just happen because a group of powerful, nefarious bankers met at a resort called Jekyll Island, which is also a great name. Right? They met at that island and came up with this idea. There was a real reason for it and a much longer history there.

And at the root of that are these depressions I was talking about a little while ago, where these are happening on a regular basis. And at the time, a lot of business leaders feel like, “Okay, these are tough times, but they’re good in some ways because wages start to get too high.”

Well, once people are laid off and unemployed and start to get hungry, wages go down, you know, and also there’s some inefficient businesses out there. And this clears out the system. It’s almost a therapeutic type of process. And so, you know, they were sort of okay with it.

But then what happens in 1907 is you have the Panic of 1907, and panic being the term used really for depressions at that time, and that one starts right in Manhattan. It has to do with, you were mentioning, it has to do with the copper magnate who’d run afoul of some titans of finance, and they were sort of trying to wipe him out. But then it spiraled out of control. And also there were sort of bigger macroeconomic forces at the time that were susceptible to this.

But once it spirals out of control, JP Morgan himself basically has to coordinate the financial power of the country and come in and intervene and stop the bank runs and stop the panic. And the Secretary of the Treasury takes the train from Washington, D.C. up to Manhattan and then basically says, “Okay, we’re going to give treasury reserves to you as well, Morgan, to manage in your attempt to stop this depression.” So it’s pretty obvious who the most powerful financial figure in the country is. Right? It’s not the Secretary of the Treasury.

It’s not a government official. It’s JP Morgan. But they’re successful. They’re able to stop the meltdown.

Although there is then a depression that lasts for a while, and there’s millions of unemployed workers and people are hungry and people are cold. But it could have been worse. This event really does actually scare Wall Street and scares business leaders.

And they say, “Look, our banking system, it needs some work, needs some improvements.” And they look at the rest of the world, the rest of the industrialized world, mainly Europe, and they say, “Okay, these places all have central banks.”

And our country is really an anomaly because America doesn’t have a central bank.

And that has to do with Andrew Jackson back in the Jacksonian era, before the Civil War, where he thinks the Bank of the United States, which was sort of a quasi-central bank, he considers it to be a monopoly, and slays the dragon, destroys that monster as he conceived it. And so there’s no central bank in the United States, and that makes it an outlier.

But now these business leaders are saying “We need to have a central bank. Because what happens when another situation like we just went through with the Panic of 1907 comes along and J.P. Morgan isn’t there?”

And so that gets the ball rolling towards the Federal Reserve.

But what happens is if these bankers, they would have liked to have set up essentially a private central bank, a central bank, that they would own it. They would control it. They would be completely in charge of it. That’s what they would have liked to have happen.

But they ran into something that I call banking politics, which is grassroots opposition. And that is workers and farmers had other ideas and were critical of this banker orthodoxy and push back against it. And what they wanted was to have a more public central bank. Many of them would have liked it to be completely public.

They would have liked to have a board governing it that was elected in elections and things like this. But what they did not want to have, certainly, is the bankers just controlling the nation’s central bank.

And so that debate that goes on then over the next few years does lead to our Federal Reserve System, which is, I’m sure you talk about it here on your program, is odd because it’s private, but it’s also public. And the reason why it’s like that is because political bargain is what produced it.

A political bargain between the bankers that just wanted to be completely in control and a public that was not wanting them to have that control and wanted to have some accountability and oversight.

Steve Grumbine:
00:25:03

So with that in mind, you talked about banking politics. And this is the part, I think, for the listeners, because I’m sure we have some bankers that listen to this too. God love you.

But the average person is an activist, maybe even an academic that is in an adjacent field or heterodox economists, et cetera. But we’re all looking for the answers here, sir.

I’m very inspired by the William Jennings Bryan kind of thing and the whole kind of, “We can’t have all those securities in there. That would be socialism.” And all the other, you know, kind of debates that were going on during that time. Tell me about who the players are.

And obviously, we know the banking magnates, the banking big dogs. But the populism, the economic populism that was around at that time, very, very vibrant, and there were a lot of different voices.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Christopher Shaw:
00:25:56

Yeah. That’s a whole very complicated landscape because there’s so many actors in it.

And I find it inspiring because what it is at its root is you have ordinary citizens, many of whom do not have a lot of formal education, who believe that they can understand complicated matters, such as finance, that are important to their lives and also are committed to democracy, as in the idea that they should have a voice over this major factor in their lives. So that’s what banking politics is. And when we’re looking at who the people involved are, a lot of these people are farmers.

And at that time, a lot more Americans were working in agriculture, but these are small farmers growing wheat or corn or cotton, or they’re raising hogs or beef or whatever. But then they also are part of an organization of the other farmers in their neighborhood.

And they’re going to meetings and they’re talking about “What should the banking system look like?” This is literally what’s happening. Small meetings of citizens talking about questions of importance.

You know, not saying JP Morgan just gets to decide it all. But it’s not just farmers. I don’t want to leave that impression at all, because it’s also a lot of workers.

We’re talking about construction workers, steel workers, coal miners, all of those industries that were important at the time. And they’re organized many cases. And in terms of where they’re most able to actually articulate their voices and be heard is through labor unions.

And so you have a similar thing where the labor union meeting, just on the local level, they are going there and they are talking about issues like bimetallism. They’re talking about postal banking. They’re talking about the Federal Reserve as that becomes an issue.

There’s talking about government credit programs to do things like farm lending. These are all issues that these people are discussing. And they’re coming up with programs for this.

And then they are expressing what they want to their elected representatives and letting them know about, okay, this is how we see this issue, and this is what we want you to do. So these are independently organized, self-financed membership organizations. And then they’ll also have like national conventions and come together.

And that just helps them to amplify their voice even more. But this is what banking politics was. It was a grassroots politics, and it really was quite effective.

And it shows us it’s very easy to be cynical about the potentialities of democracy. Right? We see the fact that there are oligarchs and we see the disproportionate influence they have.

But what this history shows us is that democracy can function at least closer to our ideals of it, where everyday citizens can tackle these major issues and have their voices heard and actually influence the course of events in politics. Like they were able to challenge Wall Street and to a certain degree, win.

And I think that’s a pretty impressive story, and it’s not one that we’ve heard, but it’s one that I worked a lot of years on to put it together and put it in this book so that we can see that this is here. And the thing is, if they did it back then, we could do it today.

Steve Grumbine:
00:29:10

You know, I think that’s a really important point.

And let me just say this, and this may just be a little bit of Steve nuance here, but I find the thing that is most important about this element that we’re discussing right now is I don’t think I ever once saw you say anything about an “I voted” sticker on their forehead or a selfie of “I voted”, none of the shallow “Vote blue, no matter who” or whatever. They were very, very specific about the activities that they were participating in.

Democracy didn’t look like “I’m going in to fill out my ballot” necessarily. Democracy looked like organizing. Democracy looked like having a message and fighting for it. Not just sitting there hoping some politician saves them.

But they took it upon themselves to speak and speak boldly, to not equivocate, to not dance around, to be politically correct. They fought and they fought with their lives in some cases, the coal miners.

I mean, I live in Pennsylvania, so we know about how industry destroyed coal miners, and we know how these private entities took on powers like governmental entities almost, and just destroying lives and kind of the combination of these private police forces and stuff at the time. It was a very violent period. And these things didn’t happen by just some sort of courteous, “I just voted” sticker.

They were earned, they were fought for, they were organized with, and they were organized with purpose. And I think, to me, that’s the difference.

Because I think today, many people think that all they have to do is show up at a rally, take a selfie, get the T-shirt, and go back home and vote. I don’t think they realize that it’s the persistent erosion, right?  Like water running through a creek, of constant activity to shape and form the creeks and streams and rivers. They did that, and I don’t see that kind of thing now.

I think people have mistaken voting as democracy, and that may be a part of it, but it’s the smallest part of it, because it is the ultimate act of fighting together and joining up and taking collective action and speaking with a collective voice. Not as a bunch of atomized individuals, but with purpose and with resolve. Can you talk about that? I think that, to me, is one of the most important elements of this.

Christopher Shaw:
00:31:40

That’s right. These are organized people, and organized people can beat organized money. That’s what we see here. But it was all about:
They worked together. They were organized. They were engaged with the issue. They learned about the issue together, and through this, they found their voice. And then they found ways to make their voice heard. And there were rallies and things like that.

But really, they were more focused on their legislators, their elected representatives.

They were more focused on communicating with them and letting them know where they stood on the issues and then saying, “We’re going to take this into account when it comes time, you know, election day rolls around and we go to the polls.” So they were very focused on the actual process of governing and legislation.

They were not, like you’re saying, as focused on performing their commitment to the issue through various ways, whether it’s on social media or however it was done. This was not a movement of expression.

This was a movement of doing things and of trying to understand how the actual levers of power work and how politics works and being very persistent about it. That is very much a lesson, I think, to learn.

And the thing is, as you also say, there were a lot of impediments historically that they dealt with that are not there in the same way. When you’re talking about people living in a company town in Pennsylvania, whether it be controlled by a steel company or a coal operator.

Yeah, they had their own private police force there. They literally would try to make it so you could not talk to your neighbors, you could not communicate, and you could not organize.

That is absolutely what they did not want. They did not want you organizing. But this persistence paid off.

So, yeah, they went up against some big adversaries but they did it together, so organizing is key.

Intermission:
00:33:27

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
00:33:46

You know, we did a long run on corruption.

We’ve interviewed people like Bill Black and others who are fundamentally focused on regulation and actual changing of the system through oversight and citizen engagement and things like that. And we went back to the corruption that led to the Great Depression.

The young lawyer from New York that fought this fight, for the life of me, I can’t remember his name.

Christopher Shaw:
00:34:17

Ferdinand Pecora.

Steve Grumbine:
00:34:18

Yes, Pecora! Ferdinand Pecora is exactly who I’m talking about! Thank you for that. He took a belt to their rump.

And now the things that we would have liked to have changed didn’t really all happen there. But let’s just be fair, he opened season on them. I hate to use the term sacred cow, but there were no sacred cows in this moment.

That he went after the things that you weren’t supposed to say and he said them just outright. And you saw the things that fed into the New Deal reforms and so forth.

You speak at length about the New Deal reforms and some of the lessons of the era. Glass-Steagall and others. Can you talk a little bit about what led to those and how we got to the Great Depression and what those reforms look like?

It was populism.

I mean, yes, you had FDR in the mix and all the other stuff. But really, at the end of the day, you still had, once again, people fighting back. Bitter, unhappy, unwilling to accept things as they were. Talk about what led to the Great Depression and some of the New Deal kind of reforms that came out of it.

Christopher Shaw:
00:35:24

Absolutely right, that people were not going to accept the status quo.

But actually, because you brought up Ferdinand Pecora and because it relates to what today, I guess I’ll just briefly, before I get into that, Pecora comes in and the way hearings used to be done and the way congressional investigation used to be done compared to how it’s often going on today. Back then, Pecora took the legal authority of Congress to go in and really look at what was happening in these big Wall Street banks because he’s trying to investigate the great stock market crash of 1929, Black Tuesday, and then what happens after that. So he does a lot of investigation and then he starts bringing in the major bankers of the time and putting them on the stand and interrogating them.

And this exposes exactly, you know, what had happened. And people, they already knew there was something wrong, but now they can see more specifically how it happened.

And this kind of intentional, purposeful, non-performative congressional hearing. These days you look at a lot of congressional hearings and you know, I’ll just attack both sides on this.

You have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene getting into shouting at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and you have Jasmine Crockett jumping in. And I mean, they’re playing to the cameras is what they’re doing. They want a sound bite, they want to get attention.

And they’re not addressing this in the way that hearings can be done. And hearings can be very effective when there is a plan and the work has to been done beforehand.

And so I’ll just say that’s a difference in our politics that I see.

But back to the Great Depression, there’s a lot of reasons that have been thrown up there as to what’s behind the Great Depression and what caused it. People have talked about the economic inequality at the time. People have talked about the problems with the international gold standard.

But one thing that I will say about it is that again, we were talking earlier about the banking system and how weak it was.

And once these banks started failing, it just really spiraled out of control because then you have a situation where people, the money disappears, right? The bank failed, the money isn’t there, the banks can’t lend, credit markets dry up. And this definitely made the depression a lot worse.

And so this means between the bank failures and the lack of lending in the economy, it was obvious to people that the banking system was a real major problem. And there already was a lot of popular interest in banking questions, a lot of engagement with those issues.

And now that’s just intensified because of the Depression, because people have seen their bank account disappear, because they’ve seen the bank close, because they’ve been denied a loan, because the bank isn’t giving any loan, because it’s not in a position where it feels like it can give loans, because it never knows when it’s going to come up short. So we have just an intensification of banking politics at that time.

And Herbert Hoover, he’s there when the depression starts and he’s very hesitant to do much.

I don’t want to say he doesn’t do anything, but he’s very concerned about what is considered to be the proper role of government and not overstepping that by interfering too much in the economy. And when Roosevelt comes in, he is open to using government in a more creative and dynamic way. So he actually did not like the idea of the FDIC.

He agreed sort of with the reason why bankers had always been against guaranteeing deposit, having a deposits insurance fund was the idea that this would allow bankers to just be completely reckless and irresponsible.

You know, the other side of that is if you have something like the FDIC, then that gives you a real right to be much more careful about regulating the bankers, about examining their books, about seeing what’s going on. But the vast majority of the public wanted to have the FDIC. And Roosevelt heard this, and he listened, he responded.

He acted like a politician should. It was pretty clear that the American people demanded the FDIC. So Roosevelt went along with that.

And, you know, just a couple years later, he was basically trying to portray it like he had wanted it all along. Right? I mean, he embraced it to that degree.

So that was really the first big reform that occurs during the Depression as part of the New Deal that put a stop to thousands of bank failures. And from that point forward, bank runs have not been a major problem in this country. And so that stops the banking system’s meltdown.

There are then other reforms that happen.

The big one that happens then is a couple years later, they do reforms to the Federal Reserve System, which sort of centralizes control over the system in Washington, D.C.

So one of the problems that becomes clear during the Depression is that there’s a dozen different Federal Reserve banks, and they don’t always agree on policy. And so they’re sort of doing their own thing. So that leads to a lack of a coordinated response.

And what the reform does in the Banking Act of 1935 is it centralizes power in a new board that is able to make sure that all the Federal Reserve banks are coordinating their efforts throughout the country. And so what this means is now monetary policy can be more effective.

And when you’re in a situation like the Great Depression, where money is being destroyed because of, a lot of times bank failures, you need to get more money created. And so this then gives the government new ability and new powers to create money.

And the money supply expands by a lot during the Depression because of a number of policies that the Roosevelt administration pursues.

But again, during this debate about how should we change the central bank, part of the reason why they’re able to get these reforms is because there’s a huge movement out there.

I mean, a lot of people, a lot of everyday citizens in America are saying, we actually want to replace the Federal Reserve with a government-owned, controlled, truly government central bank. That’s what we want. So that’s the alternative.

And when that is a viable political alternative, we see the bankers on the other side becoming much more amenable to adjustments in the Federal Reserve System. And that’s what we end up getting. So those are some of the major programs that we see during the New Deal.

Other things we see is we see more availability of credit through the government to farmers and homeowners.

So this saves a lot of homes and farms, and then over time leads to a situation where mortgages become a lot more available to homeowners in the future. And so the reforms that are put in place during the Great Depression, they really do make the banking system work better for the average American.

The banking system is not creating depressions every 10 or 20 years. They’re not worried about their savings disappearing when a bank fails. People are able to get loans, including mortgage loans.

So these kinds of reforms make the bank system work a lot better and also mean that there’s less public interest in these kinds of banking questions because it kind of seems like it’s resolved and fixed, maybe not entirely to how they would have liked it, but well enough to where it’s not ever present in their mind anymore.

Steve Grumbine:
00:42:45

So you jumped to the Banking Act in 1935, and we kind of touched on FDIC because of the Banking Act of 1933 [Glass-Steagall Act]. But that also touched on something that many people probably heard of because it was repealed. The fullness of it was repealed.

It had already been whittled away. But the almighty Glass-Steagall Act, you touched on Carter Glass and Henry Steagall and your writing here.

I’m curious, can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of Glass-Steagall and how that played into all this?

Christopher Shaw:
00:43:16

Yeah, well, that’s the thing. There’s so much to discuss in the New Deal. I am a short-changing Glass-Steagall. How could I do that? Yeah.

So Glass-Steagall is, of course, the wall between investment banking and commercial banking that then goes away during the Clinton administration towards the very end of his time in office. And people have pointed at the way that that then led to the financial crisis a decade later in 2007, 2008.

And one thing I’ll say about the Glass-Steagall Act, and I wrote a whole article about Carter Glass, and he’s a character who pops up again and again
in my book because he’s a very influential senator from Virginia, who has his fingers in banking policy all the way from the Federal Reserve Act all the way through the New Deal.

And I think we hear Glass-Steagall Act, we think, okay, this guy was in favor of banking reform. But in fact, he’s constantly carrying water for the bankers. I’m not going to say he was just their stooge, but he was very against these populist reforms throughout.

And so I was discussing how the bankers are a force that these grassroots banking politics, these workers and farmers have to deal with when they’re trying to reform the system. Well, they also have a figure like Carter Glass, who’s a major force in Congress and is not interested in these reforms either.

But he does come around to the idea of separating commercial and investment banking after the stock market crash in 1929. So that’s sort of the one thing that I think we can give him credit for, although he really only wanted it to be for private banks. So like J.P. Morgan’s bank, for instance, they would be exempt. Because really what he’s worried about is that you could have the Federal Reserve System, which he considered himself to be the father of,
he had a paternal feeling towards it, that it could be negatively impacted by a investment affiliate of a Federal Reserve member bank failing. So the House of Morgan, he would have liked for them to be exempt from Glass-Steagall, but again, he isn’t able to do that.

And that is because there’s a lot of public demand to have this be a more sweeping kind of reform. So Glass was really a reactionary in many respects on this issue. Steagall is another matter. He was more open to reform.

He was definitely supportive of the FDIC. But he’s another one of these Southern committee chairmen who had so much power during the New Deal and oftentimes limited what it could achieve.

But in these cases, there were reforms that were able to get around some of them.

And that, again, had a lot to do with banking politics, with this grassroots citizen engagement that was able to overcome the likes of Carter Glass, who was, by the end, during the Banking Act of 1935, very frustrated by his inability to impede that legislation, for instance.

Steve Grumbine:
00:46:01

So one of the other things that, you know, this is kind of out of order here, but just this really stuck out to me, and this is really new turf for me. I had not thought of this. It probably said it differently.

And maybe as I dig deeper, when we’re done with this and I start thinking about what we’ve said, maybe I’ll have a bigger epiphany but when you talked about asset money or asset currency, I’m not exactly sure, but it was basically the banks would be able to create currency based on assets that they had, as opposed to fiat, which would be by decree from the government here. And that whole conversation, it was a pretty big deal at that time. It played into the Emergency Banking Act, I believe, and a few other things.

Can you talk to me about what that asset money is, how that plays out? I mean, what does that mean in real terms? And what was the lightning rod of that conversation?

Christopher Shaw:
00:46:54

Well, this is a great example of how you had everyday citizens interested in matters you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to care about. So after The Panic of 1907, this asset currency debate really comes to the forefront.

And like you say, what it’s about is that the bankers essentially wanted to be able to issue money based on whatever assets they had in their portfolios. Right? They just wanted the freedom to be able to issue money without getting involved in the government.

And specifically at that time, they’re talking about currency. So, you know, at this time, currency is a bigger proportion of the amount of money that circulates like actual physical currency.

And if a bank wants to, this is before the Federal Reserve System, over time, it will take over all of the issue of paper money.

But before that, what you have is you have banks that they get a charter from the federal government and they can then issue paper currency. And the constraint on them, though, was that they needed to buy government bonds to do that.

Well, after the Panic of 1907, the banks want to escape that constraint and not have to buy these government bonds and put that in their portfolio. And instead they can just issue money based on other things that they have.

And so the critics of that, like William Jennings Bryan, said, “You know, this is yet another trying to step away from government authority over money.” And what someone like Bryan wanted was he wanted greenbacks, i.e., the money that was created during the Civil War to finance the union war effort.

That was not based on, you know, any connection to precious metal or anything. It’s just based on the fact that it’s totally fiat money. The government says this is money, so it is money.

So that’s the direction that Bryan and a lot of others thought that we should be headed towards. The banks, though, they wanted to go the other direction where they would have even less government involvement in how the currency system worked.

Steve Grumbine:
00:48:47

I appreciate you explaining that.

I mean, I thought I knew what you were saying there, and I read it a couple different times, but it was one of those things where banks create loans and loans create deposits. And in this realm of modern banking, they don’t even have reserve requirements.

They don’t have the same asset kind of requirements that they had even back then. Now it’s a very, very, very different world.

And there’s a lot of stuff that went on in between the Great Depression and the New Deal and FDR and today. But I want to kind of pivot to today.

Obviously, in 1971, we left the Bretton Woods Accord and that ending of the pseudo world dollar standard, gold standard. You know, pegging off of gold.

I mean, World War II was an incredibly important time for the United States to emerge as the global hegemon because the rest of the world had blown itself up and back. And the factories that the rest of the world had were decimated by bombing raids and a host of other things.

And the US had massive productive capacity at the time. It had used its Marshall Plan to ramp up all kinds of production. It also was able to leverage purchasing delaying tactics through selling war bonds.

Not really a funding operation per se, but really more of a ability to maintain an economy that wasn’t spiraling into inflation because of a lack of production for domestic goods. Really focused on the war machine. But that entire dynamic created the need for someone to take over to help rebuild the world after World War II.

And the US got to be the dominant hegemon as a result of that. And there was a lot of NGOs that came out of that, a lot of weird things like the IMF [International Monetary Fund], World Trade Organization, World Bank.

You even have the Peace Corps and all the other things to fight against Uncle Joe. But all that aside, it fed up to the 70s.

And that’s when you see the great hockey stick of inequality as the government and industry and the banks understood, hey, we are on a free floating fiat currency not tethered to any kind of commodity whatsoever, not tethered to production. But really, in fairness, the maximum policy space for the US Government, which maintained its hegemon by the role of the tax.

The tax maintained the monopoly power of the currency, and it gave the US a lot of power. I mean, then you have being able to use the trading for oil with US dollars.

And then of course, the global reserve currency allowed us to have unbelievable power over developing nations and so forth. But that benefit didn’t really hit Main Street at all. In fact, you can see that there were blips and moments.

But Jimmy Carter even started the era of austerity. You know, we’ve got to tighten our belts, we’ve got a skimp, we’ve got to this, that and the other. You had all the gas lines, the odd even days.

And yes, I was around for that. And you know, I remember the gas lines and I remember the Carter era really for all his good as a house builder later. It was really not a great time.

It was really the beginning of the neoliberal era.

And then Reagan, of course, put that on steroids and through the Cold War, being able to spend, spend, spend on military, using military Keynesianism.

But then flash forward, and I don’t mean to steal your thunder on trying to give the timeline, but just in the spirit of getting to where I’m trying to go, you know, you had the New World Order with George W. [Bush] And then you’ve got the new Democrat, the third way, Bubba Clinton and his triangulation and his basically out Republicing the Republicans.

And lo and behold, the deregulation era kicks in.

And that’s when we see the fall of Glass-Steagall and we see obviously the savings and loan debacle that Bill Black alone really was instrumental in bringing down the Keating Five and so forth.

And you see so much corruption and so much largesse and then the deregulation of the financial systems and the extreme, extreme inequality as Bill Clinton slashed stuff for single moms and this whole concept of the surplus which destroyed the economy and gave even W, God I never want to say a good thing about W, but actually gave W a recession and then the financial crisis.

But out of that came movements like the Tea Party, which originally wasn’t necessarily just a Republican baby. I mean, you had all kinds of people involved in that in the beginning, and then you kind of realized it was an Astroturf thing.

But I guess the point I’m making is, is that you saw the resurgence of the instability that had been solved in the 30s, suddenly coming back in the 2000s and the rise of Occupy Wall Street and stuff like that.

In the spirit of just getting to modern moments here, talk to me a little bit about the rise of Occupy Wall Street and kind of what the deregulation of those old New Deal policies had in terms of affecting the economy.

Christopher Shaw:
00:54:17

Right. Well, yes, the two sort of bookends of my book is one, we’re starting in a Gilded Age with a lot of inequality and a lot of economic instability. And now we’re ending something that looks similar to that.

And the course of that, why we end up back sort of where we started has everything to do with the deregulation that occurred and I think you’re right that this starts actually under Carter, but then picks up under Reagan. But we can see the beginnings of it even in the 60s, in certain ways administratively, and then the end of the Bretton Woods system in the early 70s.

But the end result is that those victories that have been won through grassroots banking politics, through the engagement of the ordinary citizen in the first half of the 20th century, start to get rolled back in the late 20th century and into the 21st century.

And not surprisingly, we see that the banking system, in terms of its instability and its generating of inequality and those things looks a lot like it did before. Now, the positive side of this, though, is that it means that people are no longer taking banking questions for granted.

And that’s where we see Occupy Wall Street emerge, because people are again recognizing the relevance of banking to their lives, and they’re getting engaged in these questions again in a way that they hadn’t in decades. And so I see Occupy as sort of obvious, made it clear that this process was underway of sort of citizen re engagement with these financial questions.

And I think, you know, that was a very dramatic instance of that. But I think this has taken hold.

And when Bernie Sanders was campaigning in 2016, talking about the big banks and breaking them up, when you see people who are interested in MMT and studying that, these are all examples of how we are seeing people get more involved in these questions again.

And it’s sadly, though, as a response to the destruction of the reforms that were won through struggle in the first half of the 20th century and the consequent problems that have arisen as a result.

Steve Grumbine:
00:56:28

Where do you find your hope now, Chris? Do you have hope? I mean, are you seeing that hope emerge?

Because let me be the Debbie Downer and you can be the upper if you need, if you got it in you. All right, I see Bernie Sanders largely as controlled opposition at this point. I was a huge Bernie fan.

I mean, I fought 24 by 7 by 365 for him during the first run, and then I stuck with him up to the second run.

And then when he once again caved into his good friend Joe Biden the first time, his good friend Hillary Clinton, people that did not have the same kind of goals and aspirations that I had that were largely pushing the kind of Wall Street friendly stuff that I fought against, right, that I was vehemently against.

So for me, I’m kind of stuck in this negative Nancy, where I don’t really see an electoral path forward because we don’t have the power of the people fighting for the kinds of stuff that you show clearly is what it takes to make the kind of change that we need instead of this weird kind of defense of politicians. There’s no will to hold public servants accountable for these things.

There’s no will to learn, there’s no will to fight back, at least not in a coherent, unified fashion.

And so for me, while some of us, unfortunately not nearly enough of us are aware of these issues, there’s a lot of gentlemen’s club out there that wants to do it very quaintly and nicely that don’t recognize how it was done before. That it was demands, it was action, it was absolute spine. There was no equivocating. And today I see a whole lot of fear-based equivocating.

And part of that is, let’s be fair, we’re living in times that are no longer secretly fascist. We’re living in times where fascism has really kind of said, “hey, I’m here, baby! Look, you know, what are you going to do about it?”

And I think people are afraid to find their voice. I mean, you see it to some degree with the fight for Palestine, and you see it in some regards with Black Lives Matter.

You see it at times in moments of trade unionism. But the idea of a class struggle unionism, where everybody’s in it together, where we’re all fighting toward a general strike, or we’re all fighting toward monetary reform, we’re all fighting for big fiscal or whatever, right? I mean, name your poison. The Green New Deal. There just isn’t that kind of unified proletariat.

There isn’t the kind of unified working class that is needed. There’s a tremendous amount of poor people that feel like they’re embarrassed future millionaires, that are just literally not getting the plot here.

I fight this every day. Doesn’t mean that I’m right. It just means that I am cynical. And so I come to you, you are a master of the history of this.

I’m curious if you have the Nostradamus element too. What are your thoughts? Do you see a path forward? Obviously, there is a path forward. Do you see us being able to accomplish it?

Christopher Shaw:
00:59:40

I think there’s a lot of reasons to feel exactly the way that you do. Just the Bernie Sanders campaign.

It’s obvious that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything they can to undercut and undermine him over the years, right? Yes, we all witnessed that and saw it, and that’s a great example.

I guess one thing about being a historian is it forces you to take the long term view.

And so let’s say I’ve transported back to the 1930s after Glass-Steagall, and they basically destroyed the House of Morgan because they forced it to choose between investment banking and commercial banking. No one would have been able to believe that in 1907, when J.P. Morgan is the financial titan who is presiding over the nation almost for a moment there. And you asked me about how I got writing this book in the first place.

When I started writing back in 2005, 2006, it was like I was excavating an entire attitude towards banking that was like alien because people weren’t even talking about it. People on the Left, banking was barely an issue. And today, hey, there’s podcasts like yours, right?

So I think that people will rise to the demands of their times. And what we see in the realm of finance is we need changes. And I think people recognize that more are becoming more educated on it.

And the question though, of how to do it politically, though, that takes trial and error and that takes time. And it took the populists of yesteryear that we’ve been discussing, it took them time too.

But I do see these examples in the past of everyday Americans, just average citizens who managed to find a way to win these major victories. And I do have the hope that our contemporaries can do the same.

Steve Grumbine:
01:01:26

I’m continually dismayed by technocracy and technocrats and the appeal to experts. And, you know, I certainly am glad that my fellow alt media and podcasters and stuff reach out to the experts. I’m no different.

I’m reaching out to you. I reach out to all the different economists that I talk to. You know, that is definitely an appeal of sorts to authority.

But I also think that what we’ve done by continually appealing to authority is clip the wings of populism and clip the wings of the working class feeling empowered to fight back. And look at myself. And, you know, people used to always tag me with Warren Mosler and Stephanie Kelton.

I’m embarrassed because I’m not an economist. I’m a layperson. I happen to be an informed layperson, but I am still a layperson.

And it was kind of weird to have the three of us tagged in all these posts. And I’m sure they were like, “why is this layperson being tagged with me?”

But the reality is, is that I feel like the appeal to authority, the constant expert, you know, “hey, I gotta have an expert come on to talk about this.” Kind of steals the responsibility away from working class people to own this.

And for me, part of my role in this world is to make people realize, no, you are part of this. You are accountable. Once you know better, it’s time to do better. And I’m here to make you know better.

If you hear, if you listen to these experts, you too can be empowered to fight back.

Now, I don’t know that you’re going to necessarily win it at the ballot box in the same way, but one thing’s for sure, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And when you’re willing to fight, somebody’s going to listen. Because capital wants to be unimpeded.

And if you’re out there making life hard for them, if you’re out there blowing the whistle, they’re either going to stomp you down, which is not unheard of. We’ve seen bloody things happen in the past. Or they’re going to change. But the more people you have, they can’t kill us all right? They can’t.

I mean, maybe they could. I hope they wouldn’t. But the point is, is that it takes numbers and it takes resolve, and it’s not going to happen
appealing to academics. With all due respect to academics who I’m grateful for the work they do, so I have the thing to pivot from. But as an activist, as somebody who wants to see change, people need to see themselves in that. They can’t keep looking at academics.

They need to look in the mirror and say, “I am the change.”

It’s going to happen because I decide to work with my other proletariat, other friends in arms here, to make this change happen, to make them realize that none shall pass. You are going to hear what I have to say. You will do something different and get enough people to make that so.

And whether that’s at the ballot box or simply becoming ungovernable, blocking traffic, doing whatever they used to do, what unions used to do. I mean, look at all the union actions from yesteryear. These were not people just sitting there singing in drum lines.

They were literally losing their lives fighting. Fighting for things that mattered. And I think as scary as that is for people to look that dog in the mirror, I think that’s the reality.

I think we’re at a point now where, you know, the Princeton study that came out in 2014, that showed there’s zero perceptible relationship between what the public wants and what they get through their government. There’s zero percent, any kind of validity of that whatsoever.

And with that in mind, when you think about that, that’s gotta prompt you to maybe try something different, right? Maybe doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results isn’t the jam we think it is. Your final thoughts on this?

Christopher Shaw:
01:05:19

I think that there’s a lot of knowledge out there and that is important to have as you go forward. But all times look different and you have to get out there and be creative and see what works. And ultimately, yes, it is about taking action.

It’s about discarding the ideas that don’t work and the attempts that haven’t and being creative and moving forward.

And one thing I think we can learn from earlier generations of Americans struggling against a exploitative banking system is people can be creative and in the end, they can win.

Steve Grumbine:
01:05:54

I love it. Thank you so much, Chris. Folks, this is the podcast Macro N Cheese. My name is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host. My guest was Christopher Shaw.

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End Credits:
01:05:55

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