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Federal Corporate Law And The Business Of Banking, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks
Federal Corporate Law And The Business Of Banking, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks
Faculty Scholarship
The only profit-seeking business enterprises chartered by a federal government agency are banks. Yet there is barely any scholarship justifying this exception to state primacy in U.S. corporate law.
This Article addresses that gap. It reinterprets the National Bank Act (NBA) – the organic statute governing national banks, the heavyweights of the financial sector – as a corporation law and recovers the reasons why Congress wrote this law: not to catalyze private wealth creation or to regulate an existing industry, but to solve an economic governance problem. National banks are federal instrumentalities charged with augmenting the money supply – a …