The Dodd-Frank Act, enacted after the global financial crisis, requires U.S. financial regulators to define and regulate systemically risky firms and activities — a truly Sisyphean task. In this Essay, we identify two paths regulators have taken: a “descriptive approach,” which involves...

This chapter discusses the legal issues of rescue and corporate social responsibility during times of public crisis. It analyzes a corporate board's fiduciary duty related to the management of a public crisis and the provision of aid to government and the public. The thesis is that American...

The public media and politicians regularly debate the potential for hedge funds to contribute to systemic risk in financial markets. Because the hedge fund industry experienced substantial growth over the past two decades, concerns about hedge funds' systemic risk have increased and regulators...

There are few things more constant in life than the rise and fall of financial markets. When markets crash, however, we are forced to restore them while learning from our mistakes. In the wake of the recent subprime mortgage crisis, Congress has drastically but deservedly overhauled the...

It was everyone's worst nightmare; the spectre of systemic collapse. And this time, everyone was in it together. The complexity of modern financial instruments was one obvious culprit. Centuries old legal principles, such as the notion of "insurable interest", were also cast aside; old fashioned...

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act increased the powers of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System along almost all dimensions pertaining to the supervision and operation of systemically important financial institutions. With Ben S. Bernanke's term as...

Hindsight tells us that COVID-19, thought by Trump and others to have come out of nowhere, is more aptly labelled a “gray rhino” event, one that was highly probable and one that we had the power to prevent. Indeed, despite considerable evidence of the impending threats of pandemics, for the...

While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic crises to assess what we can learn from the...