The current financial services industry crisis is attributed in large part to the mortgage industry debacle. The mortgage industry initially saw a rise in home values and therefore a rise in mortgage originations. This occurred during a period that witnessed a decline in short-term interest...

Why have general-purpose stored-value cards been unsuccessful in penetrating the U.S. market? Three necessary conditions for a payment instrument to be successful are discussed: consumers and merchants need to be convinced of its advantages over existing payment alternatives for at least some...

The regulatory framework established during the Great Depression was dismantled in stages after 1969. The deregulation of deposits at banks and savings institutions created incentives to widen the scope of investments that banks and thrifts could make. Novel instruments were created that should...

This paper reviews the growth of the online business-to-business marketplaces and proposes that intense competition between and among horizontal hubs and vertical exchanges will lead to consolidation. Financial collaborative trading networks (CTNs) would follow as a consequence. CTNs allow...

The financial crisis of 2008 has revealed a number of facts that we now acknowledge. We now know that liquidity matters very much, that the future may be unpredictable, that non-transparency, complexity,and ambiguity, combined with greed can lead to “management risks” that can derail...

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was a critical event in the Global Financial Crisis, exposing serious fault lines in the structure of global financial markets and leading to widespread economic disruption. But how did Lehman, a company of over 150 years’ experience in commodities...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the integrated role of quality, innovation, and differentiation (QID) on the competitiveness of a financial organization in circumstances such as the current global financial crisis. It is a conceptual paper adopting a cross-disciplinary approach that...

This study assesses the degree of financial integration in the WAEMU (West African Economic and Monetary Union). The structure of the financial sector and its institutional arrangements indicate that financial integration is well advanced in some aspects. Common and foreign ownership of banks is...

To address the banking system’s non-performing loan (NPL) problem, the Chinese government set up four asset management corporations (AMCs). They were to buy bad debts from mainly the big four state-owned commercial banks and dispose of them over 10 years, taking a large step towards NPL...

Despite fleeing from risky activities and scrambling for cash, banks have maintained high levels of M&A activity throughout the latest financial crisis. Low prices may explain in part the appetite for acquisitions, but the outcome of these deals remains highly uncertain and success relies on an...