The year is only half past, but 2016 is well on its way to joining 2011, 2012 and 2014 in a dubious distinction: a year that zero new U.S. banks were chartered. As consolidation of existing banks continues, many have observed that the lack of new banks reflects burdensome regulatory compliance, an inhospitable interest rate environment, excessive capital requirements, an insufficiently robust economy—or some mixture of all of these.

In his classic 1946 book Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt writes that economics “is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.” And thus, while the drought of de novo banks will ripple through the American economy, it will have subtle, significant and virtually unexplored long-run effects on the next generation of bank leadership.