Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Financial Crisis Containment, Anna Gelpern

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.

First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it targets the immediate term. It involves claims of emergency, rule-breaking, time inconsistency and moral hazard. In contrast, regulation, prevention and resolution seek to establish sound incentives for the long term. Second, containment decisions deviate from non-crisis norms in predictable ways, and are consistent across diverse countries and crises. Containment invariably entails three kinds of choices: choices …

Bankruptcy Or Bailouts?, Kenneth M. Ayotte, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

The usual reaction if one mentions bankruptcy as a mechanism for addressing a financial institution’s default is incredulity. Those who favor the rescue of troubled financial institutions, and even those who prefer that their assets be promptly sold to a healthier institution, treat bankruptcy as anathema. Everyone seems to agree that nothing good can come from bankruptcy. Indeed, the Chapter 11 filing by Lehman Brothers has been singled out by many the primary cause of the severe economic and financial contraction that followed, and proof that bankruptcy is disorderly and ineffective. As a result, ad-hoc rescue lending to avoid bankruptcy …

The Bonus-Driven “Rainmaker” Financial Firm: How These Firms Enrich Top Employees, Destroy Shareholder Value And Create Systemic Financial Instability, James Crotty

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We recently experienced a global financial crisis so severe that only massive rescue operations by governments around the world prevented a total financial market meltdown and perhaps another global Great Depression. One necessary precondition for the crisis was the perverse, bonus-driven compensation structure employed in important financial institutions such as investment banks. This structure provided the rational incentive for key decision makers in these firms (who I call “rainmakers”) to take the excessive risk and employ the excessive leverage in the bubble that created the preconditions for the crisis. This paper presents and evaluates extensive data on compensation practices in …

Financial Crisis Containment, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.

First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it targets the immediate term. It involves claims of emergency, rule-breaking, time inconsistency and moral hazard. In contrast, regulation, prevention and resolution seek to establish sound incentives for the long term. Second, containment decisions deviate from non-crisis norms in predictable ways, and are consistent across diverse countries and crises. Containment invariably entails three kinds of choices: choices …

Impact Of The Financial Crisis On Australian Bank Default Risk, Robert Powell, David E. Allen

Research outputs pre 2011

Australian Banks are widely considered to have remained in far better shape during the financial crisis than their global counterparts. The Australian banking sector has retained solid earnings and good capitalisation. Indeed, the 4 major Australian banks are part of a select group of only 8 global banks who hold AA credit ratings. Nonetheless, Australian banks have experienced significant deterioration in market values of assets in line with global financial market fluctuations. The KMV / Merton structural model is widely used by Australian and global banks to measure default probabilities of their customers based on market asset values and debt …

Setting An Agenda For Monetary Reform, Jane D’Arista

PERI Working Papers

The role played by monetary policy in creating the conditions that culminated in the current crisis and the failure of the Fed’s efforts to end the credit freeze in 2008 are critical components of the analysis needed as a backdrop for reform. This paper argues that the link between excess liquidity, the buildup in debt, the asset bubbles that debt created and the financial crisis that followed are outcomes of monetary as well as regulatory policy failures; that they reflect a substantial weakening in the Fed’s ability to implement countercyclical initiatives. It argues that the effectiveness of monetary policy can …

Essay: Current And Future Challenges To Local Government Posed By The Housing And Credit Crisis,, Alan Weinstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The ongoing problems in the housing and credit markets, caused by a toxic combination of wholesale deregulation of financial markets by the federal government and imprudent lending and investment practices by financial institutions, pose significant challenges to local and state government officials. Some of these challenges are obvious. How will cities cope with an unprecedented number of foreclosures at the same time that state and local tax revenues are decreasing? When will access to credit ease in a municipal bond market that has constricted as a result of both general credit concerns and questions about the companies insuring those bonds? …