Banking organizations in the United States have long been subject to two broad categories of regulatory requirements. The first is permissive: a “positive” grant of rights and privileges, typically via a charter for a corporate entity, to engage in the business of banking. The second is...

After the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers focused on enacting improvements in two areas of financial regulation: capital and liquidity, affecting the composition of bank assets and the sources of bank funding. These improvements made both the emergence of a crisis less likely and the...

After a large economic shock, states often transfer a portion of privately held debt to the public balance sheet. The mechanism used for this transfer differs, depending on the nature and cause of the shock—mobilization expenditures, after war breaks out; relief spending, after storms or other...

After the 2008 financial crisis, reforms to financial regulation in the United States developed with an apparent contradiction at their core: While those reforms embraced cooperative international measures, they simultaneously imposed more stringent safeguards on foreign banks opening on...

This chapter examines the impact of private and public enforcement of securities regulation on the development of capital markets. After a review of the literature, it considers empirical findings related to private and public enforcement as measured by formal indices and resources, with...

In the decade-plus following the 2008 global financial crisis, the United States experienced steady economic growth that evolved into the longest expansion in the country's recorded history. It's fair to say that very few people expected a pandemic to end the run. COVID-19 upended life as we...

Cryptocurrencies are all the rage, but there is nothing new about privately produced money. The goal of private money is to be accepted at par with no questions asked. This did not occur during the Free Banking Era in the United States—a period that most resembles the current world of...

Litigation finance refers to investments in litigation by a third person not originally a party to the suit. Whether the country should embrace this new practice has sparked debate among the bar, on the Hill, in the press, and between scholars. We disagree with the premise of this debate;...

Between 2010 and 2014, the regional price of aluminum in the United States (Midwest premium) increased threefold. We argue that the Midwest premium was likely manipulated during this period through the exercise of market power in the aluminum storage market. We first use a...

For nearly half a century, the bundling of research services into commissions that paid for the execution of securities trades has been the focus of both policy discussion and academic debate. The practice whereby asset management firms make use of investor funds to cover the costs of research,...