When things go wrong, it is always good to find someone to blame. As the credit crisis started to unfold in 2007, credit rating agencies (“CRAs”) emerged as the villain – or scapegoat, one might say – for commentators and regulators alike. To sum up, observers accused CRAs of doing a...

The European System of Financial Supervision (ESFS) was established by the EU at the beginning of 2011. Participating in its operation are national authorities and EU bodies (or agencies), which are known as European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs). Under the ESFS, day-to-day supervision remains...

This paper explores the legal risks involved in depositing cryptocurrency with crypto-custodians such as crypto-exchanges. These risks materialize most acutely in case these crypto-custodians fall insolvent, which has happened over the last decade in several instances. Recent years have...

This Article critically examines the transformation of the financial services industry during and since the Financial Crisis of 2007–2009. This transformation has been marked by the demise of the major investment banks and the related rise of a set of powerful players known as private equity...

Conventional economic analysis assumes that Central Counterparties (CCPs) may help to reduce systemic risk and avoid future financial crises by mandating the central clearing of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. This view largely goes unchallenged by governments, regulators, practitioners, and...

The trigger for this article was the crisis caused by the collapse of an investment product arranged by Lehman Brothers Asia Limited and marketed in Hong Kong under the name ‘Minibonds'. As outlined in Part III below, this product proved popular among retail investors, many of whom incurred...

Most of the time, crises precede constitutions. Following a brief review of relevant historical background, this article aims to show why Iceland, after its financial collapse in 2008, is now at last on the road to adopting a new constitution to replace the provisional constitution from 1944....

During the Financial Crisis of 2008, executive officials pushed the boundaries of their legal powers as well as successfully demanding broad, open-ended delegations of new powers. This paper closely analyzes the legal bases of the U.S. policy responses to the financial crisis, yielding insights...

The paper explores the features and charts the principle theorizing of regulatory sociability from collaboration rather than intervention, whatever the interest-based motivation within crisis, towards orderliness. It concludes with a discussion of disciplinary deficit, in terms of the way that...

The U.S. residential housing market collapse illustrates the consequences of ignoring risk while funding mortgage borrowing. Collateral over-valuation was a foundational piece of the crisis. Over the past few decades, secondary markets, securitization, policy and psychology increased the flow of...