Entry restriction has a noble pedigree in banking law. Soon after the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, Parliament forbade all other business entities apart from small partnerships from issuing bank notes and their equivalents. Subsequent acts of Parliament confirmed that the object of the prohibition was to give the Bank of England the “privilege or power” of “exclusive banking.” In the United States, similar prohibitions, called “restraining acts,” were established at the state level in the early nineteenth century. Later, when Congress established the national banking system in the early 1860s, it prohibited (through the device of punitive taxation) all other entities from issuing bank notes. Entry restriction remains at the core of U.S. banking law today: it is axiomatic that no person or entity may maintain “deposit” liabilities without a banking charter.Entry restriction laws take the form of a blanket prohibition, binding not on banks but on everyone else. These laws define the privilege that a banking charter conveys; a banking charter confers an exemption from the prohibition. It is noteworthy that these prohibitions apply to a particular liability structure. The liabilities in question — bank notes and deposits — are widely understood to serve a distinctly monetary function. A central object of entry restriction laws, then, is to confine “money” creation to the government itself and to one or more specially chartered banks.When it comes to modern financial stability regulation, a seldom asked question is whether banking law’s traditional entry restriction provisions might be due for modernization. This question is among the topics addressed in a recently published book, The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation (University of Chicago Press), in which I argue that financial instability is largely a problem of monetary system design. This brief article expands on the book’s treatment of the entry restriction question.

中文翻译：

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进入限制，影子银行和货币机构的结构

进入限制在银行法中有很高的血统。1694年英格兰银行成立后不久，议会禁止除小型合伙企业之外的所有其他商业实体发行钞票及其等价物。议会随后的行动证实，该禁令的目的是赋予英格兰银行“专有银行业务”的“特权或权力”。在美国，十九世纪初期，在州一级建立了类似的禁令，称为“限制行为”。后来，当国会在1860年代初建立国家银行体系时，它（通过惩罚性税收的手段）禁止所有其他实体发行钞票。进入限制仍然是当今美国银行法的核心：没有银行宪章，任何人或实体都不得维持“存款”债务，这是理所当然的。进入限制法采取一揽子禁止的形式，对银行不具有约束力，但对其他所有人具有约束力。这些法律定义了银行宪章所传达的特权；银行宪章授予对该禁令的豁免。值得注意的是，这些禁令适用于特定的责任结构。人们普遍认为，所涉及的负债（纸币和存款）具有明显的货币功能。因此，进入限制法的主要目的是将“金钱”的创造范围限制在政府本身以及一个或多个特许银行的范围之内。在现代金融稳定监管方面，一个很少有人问的问题是，银行法的传统准入限制规定是否应进行现代化。这个问题是最近出版的《货币问题：重新思考金融监管》（芝加哥大学出版社）一书中讨论的主题，在该书中，我认为金融不稳定在很大程度上是货币系统设计的问题。这篇简短的文章扩展了本书对进入限制问题的处理。