Crypto, Housing, and Banking Regulation with French Hill | Hoover Institution

tighter regulations, more difficult financing conditions in that industry segment as a result of the financial crisis. But there's been a growth of urbanization of the country over that period of time intensively. That comes with more nimbyism, not in my backyard. That comes with more intensive bureaucratic box checking, zoning and development, regulatory rules, and high fees to even finance Build.

This is the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution's Economic Policy Working Group, where we talk about economics, markets and public policy. I'm John Hartley, your host. Today, my guest is Congressman French Hill, who is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee and has served as a U.S. representative for Arkansas' second congressional district since 2015. Earlier in his career, Chairman Hill was a staffer on the Senate Banking Committee, served in various economic policy roles at Treasury and in the White House during the George H.W. Bush administration, and was the CEO and chairman of the board at Delta Trust and Banking Corporation in Little Rock, Arkansas until its acquisition in 2014. Thank you so much, Chairman Hill, for coming on the podcast. It's a real honor to have you on.

John, it's great to be with you and always great to be affiliated with Hoover.

Real exciting to have you on and to get into this conversation. Chairman Hill, tell us a little bit more about your background. How did you first get interested in economic policy and financial regulatory issues? And when did you decide that you wanted to make them central to your congressional career?

Well, when I was a kid, I'd say in elementary school and middle school, I was a typical boy that loved exploration and archaeology, and I grew up here in Little Rock. My parents were also outdoors-oriented people and history-loving people. My mom was from Virginia. My dad's from Arkansas. They met when my dad was stationed at Fort Lee, Virginia, in Petersburg, and He swept his bride off her feet, and she had to cross the Appalachian Mountains way out here into Western America in Arkansas. And so she brought with her a real sense of love of American culture. history, and exploration, too. So when I was a kid, I wanted to go into, like, archaeology or oceanography. My dad and I loved the ocean, and we both learned how to scuba dive, and we both went on scuba diving trips when I was in my... elementary and middle school years. But as I got into high school and into college, my interest turned to business, particularly finance, the investment, the capital markets part of finance. And in my time at Vanderbilt, I got a very classic economic education there. Vanderbilt in the 1970s had a superb economics department with a particular interest actually in Latin American development economics. So I spent time in that niche area looking at the history of economics in Argentina and Brazil. I went to Brazil to try to work after college. I'd been so intrigued by economics. the Brazilian miracle of the 1960s. But the 1970s were, of course, a horrific economic policy morass, both here in the United States and in Great Britain. Of course, in