A supply-and-demand model of deregulated financial markets is compared to deposit-multiplier models, interest-rate reduced forms, the textbook IS-LM model, and a credit-market approach. This model is used to analyze a variety of financial events that simpler models find paradoxical: some events...

Corporate law and scholarship generally assume that public corporations are controlled by professional managers, while shareholders play only a weak and passive role. As a result, corporate officers and directors are understood to be subject to extensive fiduciary duties, while shareholders...

Covered bonds, traditionally associated with European finance since the time of Frederick the Great, are now becoming an important part of U.S., Canadian, and Asian finance. In these jurisdictions, market observers and government officials perceive the safety of covered bonds as an antidote for...

The recent financial woes of Greece and other nations are reinvigorating the debate over whether to bail out defaulting countries or, instead, restructure their debt. Bailouts are expensive, in the case of Greece costing potentially hundreds of billions of euros. But a bailout was virtually...

In a prior article, Professor Schwarcz examined the factors that differentiate Enron's questionable use of off-balance sheet special purpose entities, (SPEs) from the trillions of dollars of "legitimate" securitization and other structured-finance transactions that use SPEs. The presence of...

This essay examines, what, if anything, differentiates Enron's questionable use of off-balance-sheet special purpose entries, or SPEs, from the trillions of dollars of supposedly "legitimate" securitization and other structured finance transactions that use SPEs. The inquiry is important because...

This article is the first major work of legal scholarship on systemic risk, under which the world's financial system can collapse like a row of dominos. There is widespread confusion about the causes and even the definition of systemic risk, and uncertainty how to control it. This article...