In 1993, when this article was originally published, Congress had recently passed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) to reduce taxpayers' exposure to financial system losses, including their exposure at "too big to fail" financial institutions. In his new...

The policy debate on whether to strengthen or to remove the legal barriers between banking and commerce has paid little attention to what the practical effects of removing the barriers would be. To help answer this question, this article, the first part of a two-part study, provides an overview...

In the first part (in the previous issue of Economic Review) of this two-part study, the authors identified a number of possible benefits from combining banking and commerce, including portfolio diversification, the creation of internal capital markets, and economies of scale and scope. This...