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...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

It has become almost conventional wisdom that investors should avoid funds with high expense ratios. Like many nuggets of conventional wisdom, there is some truth, but many exceptions: some of the best funds come at the price of higher expense ratios. Financial planners need this type of...

Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform regulations and other postcrisis regulations and guidelines have put enormous pressure on financial institutions to optimize the use of their scarce capital and to improve their return on equity (ROE) which has been significantly compressed compared to historical...

We present an overview of methods to estimate risk arising from operational losses. Our approach is based on the study of the statistical severity distribution of a single loss. We analyze the fundamental issues that arise in practice when modeling operational risk data. We address the...

A recurring criticism of U.S. bank supervisors is that their standards vary procyclicly with banking and economic conditions. The 2010 reforms of supervisory standards for bank capital adequacy and liquidity (Basel III) directly address procyclicality in supervision and its effects on credit...