Guardians of finance : making regulators work for us

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- An Accident? -- This Book -- Financial Regulation Matters -- Some Final Introductory Remarks -- Road Map -- Chapter 2. Regulating Finance Is Hard to Do -- Introduction -- Shareholders versus Debt Holders: The Essence of Regulatory Complexity -- Three Approaches to Financial Regulation -- Adam Smith and James Madison on Making the Guardians Work for Us -- Innovation and Financial Regulation -- International Financial Regulation: A Sisyphean Task -- Complex but Not Hopeless -- Chapter 3. Incentives Run Amok -- Why Shareholders Don't Rule -- Compensation and Incentives -- Going for Growth in Mortgage Lending -- Harder Evidence -- The Special Role of Ratings Organizations -- Risk Managers and Risk Models: Where Were They? -- Chapter 4. How US Regulators Encouraged the Financial Crisis -- Greenspan's Fed -- The Fed, Credit Default Swaps, and Bank Capital -- Born versus Greenspan, Rubin, and Levitt: Guess Who Won? Guess Who Lost? -- The SEC: See Nothing, Know Nothing, Do Nothing -- The Credit- Rating Agencies: The SEC, Congress, and Everyone Else -- The FDIC: People Are People -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- Some Final Remarks -- Chapter 5. American Crisis? Ain't Necessarily So -- The Luck of the Irish -- The Run on the Rock -- An Icelandic Meltdown -- Notes on Other Crises -- Failure Is Not Inevitable -- Chapter 6. Been Down This Road Many Times Before -- Crisis . . . Financial Reform . . . Crisis . . . Financial Reform . . . -- A Solution to Banking Problems: Create National Banks and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency? -- A Solution to Systemic Banking Problems: Create the Federal Reserve System? -- A Still Better Solution to Preventing Bank Runs and Costly Bank Failures: Create a Federal Deposit Insurance System?.