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So I look at the uh intersection of law, finance, history and politics. It's a
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lot of things to intersect, but the intersection actually is really a rich place to be. So where in in practical
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terms that means I'm looking at the institutions of banking and central banking uh the way that they overlap
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between government and and markets uh and looking at how they evolve through history.
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Key takeaways are that the my my primary research subject is the Federal Reserve,
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central banking generally, but especially the US Federal Reserve system. And the key takeaway is that the
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Federal Reserve is an institution that has been built by people. These people have desires, they have interests, they
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have histories, and they work sometimes strategically with a long-term vision of
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what the Fed should be and what it should become. And sometimes they are subject to the winds of history and and
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accident. And so, as uh a legal scholar and a financial historian, it's my job
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to look at how these subjects in history built institutions that changed over time. and what tools do they use
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including law but also force of personality norms traditions politics and other things like
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that. So it's it's a bit unusual uh to come at these questions from the backgrounds I'm coming at them from. So
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so again I'm I'm both a financial historian and a lawyer and lawyers are
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very interested in the practical and policy implications of their research. Historians aren't always, in fact,
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sometimes historians pride themselves in saying, "I am disconnected from the
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present. I'm very interested in the past." And what I do is take the past,
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what we know about these institutions and where they've come from. And then ask questions about the present. The
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Federal Reserve and its policies are some of the most uh debated and contentious issues that we see today. It
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wasn't always so. And to understand this contentious climate, we've got to
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understand just exactly what the Fed is, who within the Fed pulls the levers of power, how do they pull those levers of
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power, and to what end? And so in my work, again, this intersection of history and finance and politics and law
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gives us some of the answers that if you look at at these questions just from one
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lens, you just simply wouldn't get. I'm writing a book right now that is uh in its early stages that looks at
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one of the key decades in the development of central banking the world over which is the 1950s. This is a
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decade that's often overlooked when you look at the history of central banking
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and a key part of the of that decade what was happening during the in the United States and the Eisenhower and
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Truman administrations was balancing national policy against the threat of international communism. And so my work
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in on this project is to link our interests in financial security and specifically monetary stability which
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happens inside the Federal Reserve with national and international security. In other words, central banking and the
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shadow of the cold war. Uh I think that these are two areas that have a lot to say to each other again as a historian
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but also in the present. There's simply no question of national security in the
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United States today that doesn't have a financial component attached to it. And
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so my my project now then is to look taking again that same intersection of of law, history, finance and politics
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and see how we can put this question of financial security and national security
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in dialogue with each other. [Music]