One of the great ironies of the financial meltdown of 2008 – which was really more of a values meltdown – is that very few U.S. laws were actually broken. This paper investigates the financial crisis from a different legal perspective – that of Jewish law, using six framing principles:...

The seeds for the 2007-09 financial collapse were sewn over many years and nurtured by ill-advised governmental housing policy, the presence of pervasive fraud both large and small and the widespread failure of personal integrity. A chronology of bad choices made by individuals and the...

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...

Officials must show that they understand why and how the public's confidence in the federal government's ability to manage financial turmoil was lost. Leaders of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission must face up to their institutions' roles in an...

During the second half of 2008, the United States financial markets, and eventually all major world markets, were devastated by the aftermath of unethical lending practices by major lending institutions. These bad loans were made at the height of a real estate bubble in the United States....

The central problem for financial regulation is reducing systemic risk. Systemic risk is the risk that the failure of one significant institution can cause or significantly contribute to the failure of other significant institutions. This paper addresses the five most important policies for...

This paper explores the synchronicity of two mega-crises we are now facing: The BP oil spill and the repercussions of the 2008 financial meltdown. It examines some key common threads in both of these crises. The overarching message is that firms must maintain a culture of social responsibility,...

This article explains the roots of financial crises in one of the oldest and most fundamental problems of commercial law: hidden leverage. Common law courts wrestled with this problem for centuries and developed a time – tested solution: the doctrine of secret liens. If the debtor becomes...

This study engages in a detailed analysis of interconnectedness (i.e., the linkage between financial institutions) in the context of the failure of Lehman Brothers in October 2008 and concludes that interconnectedness was not a major cause of the recent financial crisis.The study continues with...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...