Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
How The Administrative State Got To This Challenging Place, Peter L. Strauss
How The Administrative State Got To This Challenging Place, Peter L. Strauss
Faculty Scholarship
Written for a dispersed agrarian population using hand tools in a local economy, our Constitution now controls an American government orders of magnitude larger that has had to respond to profound changes in transportation, communication, technology, economy, and scientific understanding. How did our government get to this place? The agencies Congress has created to meet these changes now face profound new challenges: transition from the paper to the digital age; the increasing centralization in an opaque, political presidency of decisions that Congress has assigned to diverse, relatively expert and transparent bodies; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within …
Why Financial Regulation Keeps Falling Short, Dan Awrey, Kathryn Judge
Why Financial Regulation Keeps Falling Short, Dan Awrey, Kathryn Judge
Faculty Scholarship
This article argues that there is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of finance and current approaches to financial regulation. Today’s financial system is a dynamic and complex ecosystem. For these and other reasons, policy makers and market actors regularly have only a fraction of the information that may be pertinent to decisions they are making. The processes governing financial regulation, however, implicitly assume a high degree of knowability, stability, and predictability. Through two case studies and other examples, this article examines how this mismatch undermines financial stability and other policy aims. This examination further reveals that the procedural rules …
The Federal Reserve: A Study In Soft Constraints, Kathryn Judge
The Federal Reserve: A Study In Soft Constraints, Kathryn Judge
Faculty Scholarship
In response to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) took a number of unprecedented steps to try to minimize the adverse economic consequences that would follow. From providing liquidity injections to save companies like Bear Stearns and American International Group (AIG) to committing to a prolonged period of exceptionally low interest rates and buying massive quantities of longer-term securities to further reduce borrowing costs, the Fed's response to the 2007 through 2009 financial crisis (the Crisis) has been creative and aggressive. These actions demonstrated that the Fed is uniquely powerful among federal agencies, …