The sub-prime crisis began in mid-2007 as a bursting of the US housing market bubble and became a truly global meltdown in 2008. Renewed instability in financial markets precipitated awareness of how policy makers must react to systemic failures. This paper discusses the primary policy issues...

This paper develops a formula to numerically estimate the unsubsidized, fair-market value of the toxic assets purchased with Federal Reserve loans. It finds that subsidy rates on these loans were on average 33.9 percent at origination. In contrast, by the 3rd quarter of the 2010, there was on...

We study how the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing (QE) influenced the behavior of Agency mortgage real estate investment trusts (REITs) - a set of institutions identified by the Financial Stability Oversight Council as posing systemic risk. We document that Agency mortgage REITs: [i] equity...

There are many events that led up to the financial crisis of 2008. This study looks at the political policies in place before the crisis happened. Focusing on the decade and a half prior to the crisis, the incentives in the financial industry led to risk mitigation. This response to mitigate...