This Foreword to a themed volume of the University of Miami Law Review relates the different contributions to the volume to emerging narratives of the financial crisis: monetary policy, deregulation, bad regulation, innovation run amok, and greed. It emphasizes how this crisis has been different...

This paper argues that during the housing bubble, housing finance markets failed to price risk correctly because of information failure caused by the complexity and heterogeneity of private-label mortgage-backed securities and structured finance products. Addressing the informational problems...

This article describes the causes of the boom and bust in the U.S. housing market, which brought down not just the U.S. financial system but the global economy. How did this vicious cycle begin? How did home prices appreciate so far and so fast? Why did rational investors not recognize and stop...

Systemic risk - the possibility that an individual firm's failure will result in broad damages to the economy as a whole - is the epitome of financial crisis. Bailouts of troubled firms have long been the standard response to systemic risk. Yet, bailouts suffer from problems of political...

What would happen if the City of Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools, and Cook County all became insolvent at the same time? How should policy-makers and courts respond? This Article argues that the pension and budget crises that have left so many local governments deeply in debt have generated...

Introduction: In praise of homeownership -- Housing finance before the New Deal -- The New Deal mortgage -- The rise of securitization -- The boom and the bubble -- The bubble bursts -- Timing the bubble -- Demand or supply? -- Theories of the bubble -- The securitization daisy chain --...

This Article takes stock of post-financial crisis regulatory developments to tell a tale of two markets within a political economy of financial regulation. The financial crisis stemmed from excessive risk-taking and dodgy practices in the subprime home mortgage market, a market that owed its...