The U.S. dollar serves both as the domestic currency of the United States and as the dominant international currency for trade, settlement, and reserve purposes. The dollar’s international status provides significant benefits for the United States, but one aspect of the global dollar system as...

In her article The People's Ledger, Professor Saule Omarova offers “a blueprint for reform that would radically democratize access to money and control over financial flows in the nation’s economy.” In this Response, I critically evaluate the set of proposals put forward in The People’s...

This Article provides the first comprehensive survey and evaluation of proposed approaches to the central financial reform issue of our era: making all money held in account form “safe,” or non-defaultable, in the same way a dollar bill cannot default. Financial crises are at core a problem...

The lack of a feasible option for holding large sums of money in nondefaultable account form gives rise to unstable, panic-prone private money issuance. Providing a viable alternative that could crowd out private money issuers would be an unambiguous win for financial stability. The Federal...

A remarkable fact about post-crisis attempts to end the “too-big-to-fail” status of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) is how much these efforts depend on the creation of new classes of “loss-absorbing” creditors. If there is one thing SIFIs have never lacked, it is an...

Financial crises can wreak havoc on an economy, but they can also generate significant costs that are not directly captured by economic variables: psychic harms to those who lose their homes or jobs, and a deterioration in public faith in key societal institutions. Because of this, we should...

The greatest regulatory challenge emerging from last decade's financial crisis was the problem of “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions — those firms whose failure could trigger widespread runs in the financial system. When such firms faltered in 2008, regulators faced the dilemma of...

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 effected a separation of commercial and investment banking in two ways. First, it prohibited the affiliation of the two types of banks. Second, it prohibited commercial banks from engaging in investment banking activities, and investment banks from receiving...

A central lesson of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 was that firms behaving like banks should be regulated like banks. Nonbanks that perform the same economic function as banks — so-called “shadow banks” — create the same risks and demand the same regulatory response as depository...