Christopher Brummer is the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Financial Technology, and is the Faculty Director, Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown University. This post is based on his recent keynote address.
It is a great pleasure to be here with you, the great public servants of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. It is also particularly humbling for a securities law professor. My work is about markets, and market integrity. I spend my time researching and studying technology and innovation, international economic and regulatory coordination, and how to leverage financial markets for the underserved. I put in time as an academic and in the private sector thinking about how to build more trustworthy and credible businesses and regulatory institutions. But it is the people of the OCC—in all your colors, genders, religions, and hailing from around this vast country—who walk through the doors of this agency to help keep the economy from quite literally falling apart.
I, along with the rest of the country, owe you a massive debt of gratitude.
Black History Month is one of our most sacred times of year. It is an occasion where we think back and give thanks to our mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, who have shaped the very history of this great nation and helped to birth our unique American story. It is a celebration of a great people, and of the great American family.
Yet it is a peculiar, even ironic celebration. It is an exercise in making the unseen, seen. Indeed, every one of you here today knows that we stand on the shoulders of giants. But we know that the names of so many of our giants didn’t make it into the history books. Black history’s giants aren’t just the Douglasses, the Dubois’s, the Oprahs, the Sojourners and the Adam Clayton Powells. They are the cooks and cleaners, bellhops and janitors, farmhands and bank tellers, who marched, agitated, and died so that we can be here today.
