According to conventional wisdom, the 2008 financial crisis fundamentally changed how policymakers approach financial regulation. Before the crisis, regulators sought to prevent individual financial institutions from collapsing, but this “microprudential” strategy proved inadequate to stop...

After the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers developed two different approaches to systemic risk arising from insurance conglomerates and other nonbank financial firms. The first, dubbed an entity-based approach, empowers a public entity like the Financial Stability Board or Financial Stability...

Over the past decade, a consensus has emerged among academics and policymakers that climate change could threaten the stability of banks, insurers, and the broader financial system. In response, regulators from around the world have begun implementing policies to mitigate emerging climate risks...

After decades of disuse, antitrust is back. Renewing the United States’ longstanding distrust of concentrated economic power, antimonopoly scholars have documented widespread harms of corporate “bigness” and inspired policy initiatives to deconcentrate the U.S. economy. To date, however,...

The 2008 financial crisis exposed a longstanding problem in financial regulation: traditional regulatory strategies tend to be procyclical. That is, regulatory tools—most notably, bank capital requirements—incentivize excessive credit growth during economic expansions and insufficient...

When the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act authorized financial conglomeration in 1999, Professor Arthur Wilmarth, Jr. presciently predicted that diversified financial holding companies would try to exploit their bank subsidiaries by transferring government subsidies to their nonbank affiliates. To prevent...

More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. policymakers still have not adequately addressed one of the primary causes of the crash: foreign banks. When foreign banks first entered the United States fifty years ago, they specialized in traditional banking products like loans and...

Since the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers and scholars have fixated on the problem of “too-big-to-fail” banks. This fixation, however, overlooks the historically dominant pattern in banking crises: the contemporaneous failure of many small institutions. We call this blind spot the...

Sixty years ago, Congress established a federal pre-approval regime for bank mergers to protect consumers from then-unprecedented consolidation in the banking sector. This process worked well for several decades, but it has since atrophied, producing numerous “too big to fail” banks.This...