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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Basel Iii Liquidity Coverage Ratio And Financial Stability, Andrew W. Hartlage
The Basel Iii Liquidity Coverage Ratio And Financial Stability, Andrew W. Hartlage
Michigan Law Review
Banks and other financial institutions may increase the amount of credit available in the financial system by borrowing for short terms and lending for long terms. Though this "maturity transformation" is a useful and productive function of banks, it gives rise to the possibility that even prudently managed banks could fail due to a lack of liquid assets. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 revealed the extent to which the U.S. financial system is exposed to the risk of a system-wide failure from insufficient liquidity. Financial regulators from economies around the world have responded to the crisis by proposing new, internationally …
Basel Iii And Credit Risk Measurement: Variations Among G20 Countries, Matt Schlickenmaier
Basel Iii And Credit Risk Measurement: Variations Among G20 Countries, Matt Schlickenmaier
San Diego International Law Journal
Most countries require banks to hold extra capital to protect against unforeseen financial calamities; banks with riskier loans must hold more capital than those with safer loans. Basel II, a set of international banking standards, allows banks to measure a loan’s risk in different ways: some banks make their own judgments; others use outside agencies. The recent mortgage crisis prompted banks to reevaluate these methods, in part due to banks having failed to perceive the high level of risk inherent in securitized mortgages. The international community’s response was Basel III, an updated version of its previous standards. This Comment will …
The Inherent Instability Of The Financial System, Kim De Glossop
The Inherent Instability Of The Financial System, Kim De Glossop
The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law
The article explores one of the causes of the financial crisis of 2008 and of financial crises generally. The argument of the paper is that rather than tend toward equilibrium, financial and asset markets have a tendency to become unstable after prolonged periods of stability. The main driver of this process is the expansion of credit. Debt feeds its way into higher asset prices which in turn justify the accumulation of more debt to purchase further assets, and so on. The basis for the idea is Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis, itself a reinterpretation of The General Theory of Employment, …
The Federal Reserve As Last Resort, Colleen Baker
The Federal Reserve As Last Resort, Colleen Baker
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, is one of the most important and powerful institutions in the world. Surprisingly, legal scholarship hardly pays any attention to the Federal Reserve or to the law structuring and governing its legal authority. This is especially curious given the amount of legal scholarship focused on administrative agencies that do not have anywhere near as critical a domestic and international role as that of the Federal Reserve. At the core of what the Federal Reserve does and should do is to conduct monetary policy so as to safeguard pricing, including that …
Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach To Regulatory Assignments, Frederick Tung, M Todd Henderson
Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach To Regulatory Assignments, Frederick Tung, M Todd Henderson
Faculty Scholarship
In the years before the Financial Crisis, banks got to pick their regulators, engaging in a form of regulatory arbitrage that we now know was a race to the bottom. We propose to turn the tables on the banks by allowing regulators, specifically, bank examiners, to choose the banks they regulate. We call this “reverse regulatory arbitrage,” and we think it can help improve regulatory outcomes. Building on our prior work that proposes to pay bank examiners for performance — by giving them financial incentives to avoid bank failures — we argue that bank supervisory assignments should be set through …
Paying Bank Examiners For Performance, Frederick Tung, M. Todd Henderson
Paying Bank Examiners For Performance, Frederick Tung, M. Todd Henderson
Faculty Scholarship
Investigations into the recent financial crisis have found that banking regulators knew or should have known of many of the problems that would ultimately cripple the finance industry. We argue that their failure to address those problems prior to the crisis was at least partly due to misaligned incentives for bank examiners that encourage inadequate inspection and forbearance and discourage the curbing of ill-advised risk taking. We recommend changing examiners’ incentives to better align them with the public good. Specifically, banking regulators should be “paid for performance” — rewarded for nurturing long-term health for the banks they oversee as well …
Bridge Banks: Detox Tools For A Melted Economy, Gabriela Steier
Bridge Banks: Detox Tools For A Melted Economy, Gabriela Steier
Gabriela Steier
This paper compares the fragmented three-pillar banking system in Germany to the banking system in the U.S. and suggests an amendment to 12 U.S.C.A. § 1821(n), the bridge bank statute, to make some fragmentation of the financial sector in the U.S. possible. This paper is the first of its kind and explains why the German bad bank prototype works within the fragmented three-pillars of banking. The three pillars of banking in Germany are (1) Savings Banks (Sparkassen), (2) Private Commercial Banks (Kreditbanken, Genossenschaftsbanken), and (3) Public and Cooperative Credit Institutions (Volks- and Raiffeisenbanken). The resulting fragmented banking system is more …
Bank Ceos, Inside Debt Compensation, And The Global Financial Crisis, Frederick Tung, Xue Wang
Bank Ceos, Inside Debt Compensation, And The Global Financial Crisis, Frederick Tung, Xue Wang
Faculty Scholarship
Bank executives’ compensation has been widely identified as a culprit in the Global Financial Crisis, and reform of banker pay is high on the public policy agenda. While Congress targeted its reforms primarily at bankers’ equity-based pay incentives, empirical research fails to show any correlation between bank CEO equity incentives and bank performance in the Financial Crisis. We offer an alternative analysis, hypothesizing that bank CEOs’ inside debt incentives correlate with reduced bank risk taking and improved bank performance in the Crisis. A nascent literature shows that inside debt may dampen CEOs’ risk taking incentives. Unlike the industrial firms that …
The Financial Crisis And The Path Of Reform, Michael S. Barr
The Financial Crisis And The Path Of Reform, Michael S. Barr
Articles
In the lead-up to the financial crisis, the U.S. financial sector was overleveraged, short-funded, risky, and opaque. "Shadow banking" permitted institutions to avoid comprehensive supervision and capital requirements. Innovation outpaced the ability or willingness of private- and public-sector guardians to rein in risks. An asset bubble fed the system, until the market imploded in the fall of 2008. When the crisis hit, our society found itself illequipped to deal with the failure of leading financial firms. In the wake of the crisis, the Obama Administration proposed a set of reforms that were eventually embodied, in large part, in the Dodd-Frank …