Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that are central players in U.S. secondary mortgage markets. Over the past decade, these institutions have amassed enormous mortgage- and non-mortgage-oriented investment portfolios that pose significant interest-rate risks to the...

This paper examines the policy issues with respect to resolving the possible failure of housing enterprises Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. The authors compare and contrast these issues with those raised in the context of large bank failures and also identify important differences in the extant...

The debate over modernizing the financial structure is raising questions about the merits of modernizing the financial regulatory structure. Regulatory structure is important because an almost unavoidable feature of our current system of government is that Congress assigns multiple goals that...

The prompt corrective action provisions in FDICIA 1991 provide the supervisors with an unambiguous goal: "to resolve the problems of insured depository institutions at the least possible long-term cost to the deposit insurance fund." Yet performance of the regulators in achieving this goal has...

This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the joint performance of multivariate forecasts of economic variables. The methodology is illustrated by comparing the rankings of forecasters by the Wall Street Journal with the authors’ alternative rankings. The results show that the...

This paper discusses the institutional changes needed in Europe if prompt corrective action (PCA) is to be effective in supervising and resolving cross-border banking groups. The paper identifies these changes starting with enhancements in the availability of information on banking groups’...

This paper examines the negative externalities that may occur when a large bank fails, describes the nature of those externalities, and explores whether they may be greater in a case involving a large cross-border banking organization. The analysis suggests that the chief negative externalities...

This paper examines the properties of the X-inefficiencies in U.S. bank holding companies derived from both stochastic and linear programming frontiers. This examination allows the robustness of results across methods to be compared. While we find that calculated programming inefficiency scores...

Agency theory is used to evaluate how the European Union (EU) may deal with the resolution of goal and agency conflicts in dealing with failing financial institutions. Experience in the United States suggests that the financial and regulatory structure being put in place, which relies upon...

In 1994, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began to release statements after each meeting. This paper investigates whether the public’s views about the current path of the economy and of future policy have been affected by changes in the Federal Reserve’s communications policy as...