Financial regulation has traditionally been “hard”: national legislatures and regulators (and sometimes international bodies) require certain kinds of behavior and forbid others, on pain of business sanctions, fines, or even criminal penalties. When a financial crisis happens, the usual...

Recent developments in banking, including high-profile prosecutions for illegal activities, portend further regulatory interventions on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the structure of much banking regulation requires banks to make good faith determinations of the kinds of risks to which their...

Banks might now seem odd candidates for the role of global sustainability regulator. Nonetheless, in limited areas of their operation, where global banks kept risk on their balance sheets and were financially exposed to many types of risk often otherwise treated as “externalities,” banks...