Comparative and Foreign Law Commons^™

Law And Finance In The Context Of Crisis: The Imperative Of Structural Vision, Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

This piece explores the worldwide response to the recent financial and economic crisis through a comparative analysis of financial crisis, regulation and reform in the US and in several emerging market countries.

Two main ideas inform my argument.

The first idea is the inadequacy of ways of dealing with the crisis that fail to enlist finance more effectively in the service of the real economy, rather than allowing it to serve itself, and that misunderstand globalization as an unyielding constraint on institutional experimentation at home. A wide range of historical and contemporary examples helps make the point.

The second idea …

American Finance And American Democracy: Towards An Institutionalist "Law And Economics", Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

This article reconsiders the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009 and the present debate about the regulation of finance in the light of a vision of how finance can better serve the American economy and American Democracy. The central claim is that regulation as conventionally understood cannot adequately redress the problems, and seize the opportunities, revealed by the crisis. We should approach financial regulation as the first step in a series of institutional innovations designed to put finance more effectively at the service of the real economy (financial deepening) while broadening economic opportunity in the country (financial democratization). I develop …