Randal K Quarles: Banks as vital infrastructure for rural communities of the West

Speech by Mr Randal K Quarles, Vice Chairman for Supervision of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 5 December 2018.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

It's a pleasure to be here at Stanford, an honor to be invited to speak by SIEPR and the Bill Lane Center-two institutions for which I have long had fondness and respect-and a great luxury to have the chance to talk for an hour with a group of people who share my love for a part of the world we call the West. Most of my day job enmeshes me, of necessity, in either broad systemic questions of global financial stability or the impossibly arcane minutiae of our convoluted and labyrinthine financial regulatory system. Both of those are perfectly worthy occupations but inescapably require a relentlessly global outlook. Yet my first intellectual passion as a very young man was for the history and life of a specific part of the world-the Western United States, as place and idea. Your own presence here in the audience suggests that many of you have been moved at some point in your life, as I have been, by the words of Wallace Stegner: