In the macro-prudential literature, ‘inaction bias’ describes the supposed tendency of macro-prudential actors to favour inaction over action when considering the use of macro-prudential tools. While inaction bias is a topic of much interest in macro-prudential policy circles, it has...

The resolution planning process in the United States is still evolving. A resolution plan is a plan for liquidating, reorganizing, recapitalizing or otherwise resolving a systemically important financial institution (“SIFI”) that has reached the point of insolvency, non-viability or failure....

The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

Financial regulation after the Dodd-Frank Act has produced a blizzard of acronyms, many of which revolve around the “too big to fail” (TBTF) problem. OLA, OLF, SPOE, and TLAC are new regulatory tools that seek to build a new regime for resolving failures of systemically important financial...

This paper analyzes the link between Kamakura Risk Information Services (KRIS) data on megabank default probabilities and credit spreads. It develops an “eye-ball” test for the extent of individual-bank “zombieness” whose grade turns on how weakly a bank's credit spread responds to...

There are striking and terrifying similarities between the sudden failure of a heart and that of a financial system. In the medical literature, the former is referred to as a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). By analogy, I refer to its financial counterpart as a sudden financial arrest (SFA). In this...

As the operator of a systemically important payment system (SIPS), the Eurosystem has the responsibility of regularly assessing the resilience of the Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System (TARGET2) to various types of risks, as set out in the Principles for...

This essay was published as part of a law review symposium that evaluated my work on theregulation of large, complex financial institutions. Part I of my essay discusses the other articlespublished in the symposium issue and describes their relationship to my own work. Part IIanalyzes the global...

In this paper, we survey the nascent literature on the transmission of negative policy rates. We discuss the theory of how the transmission depends on bank balance sheets, and how this changes once policy rates become negative. We review the growing evidence that negative policy rates are...

As lender of last resort, the Bank of Canada has the responsibility of stepping in to provide liquidity in cases when markets require emergency funding. In crisis situations, a timely and effective response is imperative for avoiding systemic breakdowns. In this Commentary, I argue that in order...