The crisis enveloping global financial markets since August 2007 was triggered by actual and prospective credit losses on US mortgages. Was the United States just unlucky to have been the first to experience a housing crisis? Or was it inherently more susceptible to one? I examine the limited...

Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) prescribes prompt and deterministic termination of banks with insufficient levels of book-value capital. This paper investigates whether reliance on book-value capital is a good policy choice and if PCA is an optimal regulatory approach. I use a variant of DeMarzo...