At a time when small businesses are suffering from a credit crunch, "niche" financial institutions increasingly are filling the void left by more traditional sources of financing, such as commercial banks. In this working paper, authors Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Ronnie J. Phillips, and L....

Scholars have generally concluded that the assigning of the BHC responsibilities to the Fed in 1956 was primarily based on the historical precedent of the Clayton Act and the Banking Act of 1933 which granted some powers to the Federal Reserve with respect to bank holding companies. This...