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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Can America Govern Itself?: Deficits, Debt, And Delay, Ron Haskins Oct 2013

Can America Govern Itself?: Deficits, Debt, And Delay, Ron Haskins

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

America has now been in the throes of a deficit and debt crisis for nearly a decade. Over the last three years, the federal government has tied itself in knots trying to reach a long-term solution. Any effective solution will involve tax increases and entitlement cuts. But both parties have been unwilling to openly bargain about either the tax increases or spending cuts they are willing to consider as part of a grand bargain. Why are both parties being so intransigent? What are the prospects for a grand bargain and what might it look like? What are the consequences if …


The Ancient Roots Of Modern Financial Innovation: The Early History Of Regulatory Arbitrage, Michael S. Knoll Jan 2008

The Ancient Roots Of Modern Financial Innovation: The Early History Of Regulatory Arbitrage, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have seen an explosion of financial innovation. Much of this innovation seeks to exploit inconsistencies in the regulatory environment, and one of the most popular techniques for doing so uses put-call parity. Nonetheless, regulatory arbitrage using put-call parity is not a new phenomenon, as is frequently suggested. This Essay traces the use of put-call parity to avoid the usury prohibition back to Ancient Israel. It also describes the important role that put-call parity played in developing the equity of redemption, the defining characteristic of a modern mortgage, in Medieval England. In addition, this Essay describes how Muslims living …


The Uses And Abuses Of Risk Management: How Men Learnt To Bet Against The Gods, Kenneth Anderson Feb 1997

The Uses And Abuses Of Risk Management: How Men Learnt To Bet Against The Gods, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

This 1997 review in the Times Literary Supplement (London) conjoins two books - the first, by investment banker turned finance historian Peter L. Berstein, is a history of the idea of risk, as it developed from Renaissance times through contemporary finance. The second, by the former editor of the derivatives journal Risk, Lillian Chew, is an account of contemporary financial derivatives and their uses and abuses. The point of linking these two books in a single review is to point out that the basic ideas behind today's financial derivatives - forms of forwards, options, swaps, and so on - are …