The primary driver of commercial bank failures during the Great Recession was exposure to the real estate sector, not aggregate funding strains. The main "toxic" exposure was credit to non-household real estate borrowers, not traditional home mortgages or agency MBS. Private-label MBS...

The prevalence of the originate-to-distribute model for mortgage credit in the run-up to the Great Recession, resulted in commercial banks using their residual balance-sheet capacity to fund the expansion in the significantly more volatile segment of non-household real estate borrowers. A...

The 2008 financial crisis was the second instance since the Great Depression that many hundreds of financial institutions failed across the United States. The rescue staged by the federal government, however, was unprecedented in scale, involving an initial Congressional authorization of $700...