We address the paradox that financial innovations aimed at risk-sharing appear to have made the world riskier. Financial innovations facilitate hedging idiosyncratic risks among agents; however, aggregate risks can be hedged only with liquid assets. When risk-sharing is primitive, agents...

While systemic risk—the risk of wholesale failure of banksand other financial institutions—is generally consideredto be the primary reason for supervision and regulation of thebanking industry, almost all regulatory rules treat such risk inisolation. In particular, they do not account for...