744
Opinion of the Court
will avoid (to the extent possible) pre-emption of state law. This argument confuses the question of the substantive (as opposed to pre-emptive) meaning of a statute with the question of whether a statute is pre-emptive. We may assume (without deciding) that the latter question must always be decided de novo by the courts. That is not the question at issue here; there is no doubt that § 85 pre-empts state law. In Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp., 439 U. S. 299 (1978), we dismissed petitioners' argument that the "exportation" of interest rates from the bank's home State would "significantly impair the ability of States to enact effective usury laws" with the observation that "[t]his impairment . . . has always been implicit in the structure of the National Bank Act . . . . [T]he protection of state usury laws is an issue of legislative policy, and any plea to alter § 85 to further that end is better addressed to the wisdom of Congress than to the judgment of this Court." Id., at 318-319. What is at issue here is simply the meaning of a provision that does not (like the provision in Cipollone) deal with pre-emption, and hence does not bring into play the considerations petitioner raises.3
III
Since we have concluded that the Comptroller's regulation deserves deference, the question before us is not whether it represents the best interpretation of the statute, but
3 In a four-line footnote on the last page of her reply brief, and unpur-sued in oral argument, petitioner raised the point that deferring to the regulation in this case involving antecedent transactions would make the regulation retroactive, in violation of Bowen v. Georgetown Univ. Hospital, 488 U. S. 204, 208-209 (1988). Reply Brief for Petitioner 20, n. 17. There might be substance to this point if the regulation replaced a prior agency interpretation—which, as we have discussed, it did not. Where, however, a court is addressing transactions that occurred at a time when there was no clear agency guidance, it would be absurd to ignore the agency's current authoritative pronouncement of what the statute means.
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