Political Economy Commons^™

European Banking Union D: Cross-Border Resolution—Dexia Group, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Natalia Tente, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

In September 2008, Dexia Group, SA, the world’s largest provider of public finance, experienced a sudden liquidity crisis. In response, the governments of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg provided the company a capital infusion and credit support. In February 2010, the company adopted a European Union (EU)-approved restructuring plan that required it to scale back its businesses and cease proprietary trading. In June 2011, Dexia withdrew from the government-sponsored credit support program before its expiration date, and in July, the company announced that it had passed an EU stress test. However, just three months later, Dexia wrote down its substantial position …

European Banking Union C: Cross-Border Resolution–Fortis Group, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Natalia Tente, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

In August 2007, Fortis Group, Belgium’s largest bank, acquired the Dutch operations of ABN AMRO, becoming the fifth largest bank in Europe. Despite its size and its significant operations in the Benelux countries, Fortis struggled to integrate ABN AMRO. Fortis’s situation worsened with the crash of the US subprime market, which impacted its subprime mortgage portfolio. By July 2008, Fortis’s CEO had stepped down, its stock had lost 70% of its value, and it was on the verge of collapse due to a severe liquidity crisis. The governments of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands quickly came together and agreed to …

European Banking Union B: The Single Resolution Mechanism, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Michael Wedow, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

The options available to European governments to respond to a multinational bank in financial trouble have been severely limited since each country has its own unique laws and authority applicable to banks operating within its borders. The Bank Recovery & Resolution Directive (BRRD), which was adopted in 2013 and scheduled to go into effect January 2015, harmonizes rules across EU countries for how to restructure and resolve failing banks. However, the directive would maintain the existing system of individual national resolution authorities and resolution funds. To better secure the Eurozone banks and to compliment the Single Supervisory Mechanism, which was …

European Banking Union A: The Single Supervisory Mechanism, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Michael Wedow, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

At the peak of the Global Financial Crisis in fall 2008, each of the 27 member states in the European Union (EU) set many of its own banking rules and had its own bank regulators and supervisors. The crisis made the shortcomings of this decentralized approach obvious, and since its formation in January 2011, the European Banking Authority (EBA) has been developing a “Single Rulebook” that will harmonize banking rules across the EU countries. In June 2012, European leaders went even further, committing to a banking union that would better coordinate supervision of banks in the then 18-country Eurozone. A …

European Central Bank Tools And Policy Actions A: Open Market Operations, Collateral Expansion And Standing Facilities, Chase P. Ross, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Beginning in August 2007, the European Central Bank (ECB) responded to market turmoil with a variety of standard and non-standard monetary policy tools. This case discusses the operational framework of the ECB’s open market operation tools and standing facilities before and during the financial crisis. Specifically, this case describes the ECB’s use of its main refinancing and longer-term refinancing operations, the expansion of collateral eligible for use in Eurosystem credit operations, and the ECB’s standing facilities, including its marginal lending and deposit facilities.

Ireland And Iceland In Crisis D: Similarities And Differences, Arwin G. Zeissler, Daisuke Ikeda, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

On September 29, 2008—two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers—the government of Ireland took the bold step of guaranteeing almost all liabilities of the country’s major banks. The total amount guaranteed by the government was more than double Ireland’s gross domestic product, but none of the banks were immediately nationalized. The Icelandic banking system also collapsed in 2008, just one week after the Irish government issued its comprehensive guarantee. In contrast to the Irish response, the Icelandic government did not guarantee all bank debt. Instead, the Icelandic government controversially split each of the three major banks into a new …

Ireland And Iceland In Crisis C: Iceland’S Landsbanki Icesave, Arwin G. Zeissler, Thomas Piontek, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

At year-end 2005, almost all of the total assets of Iceland’s banking system were concentrated in just three banks (Glitnir, Kaupthing, and Landsbanki). These banks were criticized by certain financial analysts in early 2006 for being overly dependent on wholesale funding, much of it short-term, that could easily disappear if creditors’ confidence in these banks faltered for any reason. Landsbanki, followed later by Kaupthing and then Glitnir, responded to this criticism and replaced part of their wholesale funding by using online accounts to gather deposits from individuals across Europe. In Landsbanki’s case, these new deposits were marketed under the name …

Ireland And Iceland In Crisis A: Increasing Risk In Ireland, Arwin G. Zeissler, Karen Braun-Munzinger, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Ireland went from being the poorest member of the European Economic Community in 1973 to enjoying the second highest per-capita income among European countries by 2007. Healthy growth in the 1990s eventually gave way to a concentrated boom in property-related lending in the 2000s. The growth in the aggregate loan balances of Ireland’s six major banks greatly exceeded the growth in gross domestic product (GDP); as a result, bank loan balances grew from 1.1 times GDP in 2000 to over 2.0 times GDP by 2007. Given the small size of the domestic retail depositor base, the Irish banks increasingly funded …

It's Capitalism, Stupid!: The Theoretical And Political Limitations Of The Concept Of Neoliberalism, Bryant William Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This polemical essay explores the meaning and function of the concept of neoliberalism, focusing on the serious theoretical and political limitations of the concept. The crux of the argument is that, for those interested in overcoming the exploitative and oppressively destructive elements of global capitalism, opposing "neoliberalism" (even if best understood as a process or a spectrum of "neoliberalization" or simply privatization) is both insufficient and potentially self-undermining. This article also goes into some detail on the issues of health care and climate change in relation to "neoliberalism" (both conceptually and the material processes and policies that this term refers …

The Politics Of Where: The Federal Government And Canada's Urbanization, 1867-2017, Charles D. Crenna

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation responds to a single overarching research question: what is the nature and extent of the federal government’s influence on urbanization in Canada, both on its systems of cities and on their internal structure? Lessons learned regarding the federal role in Canada’s urbanization remain relevant and applicable to emerging conditions. They offer a sound, streetwise foundation for future urban policy development, based on understanding the vital politics of where.

Large, complex systems of cities are both self-organizing and responsive to strategic guidance by the federal government. Politically-difficult choices among competing urban locations can be made both by hiding …

The Controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: America's Most Expensive Weapons System And Its Global Impact, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Creative Materials

Presentation describing my 2019 Palgrave Macmillan book Global Defense Procurement and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It describes this aircraft and places particular emphasis on the government information resources from multiple countries used in writing this book.