The Eurozone today is going into the same deflationary situation that the U.S. did under Jackson's destruction of the Second Bank, and the post-Civil War budget surpluses that deflated the economy. But whereas the Fed's creation was designed to inflate the U.S. economy, Europe's European Central...

The nineteenth-century economist Walter Bagehot maintained that in order to prevent bank panics, a central bank should provide liquidity at a very high rate of interest. However, most of the theoretical literature on liquidity provision suggests that central banks should lend at an interest rate...

We propose that policymakers responding to novel contingencies are subject to first-mover disadvantage. Like innovation in the private sector, developing effective solutions to novel policy problems requires a messy process of discovery, experimentation, and repeated failure. Much as...

This Article presents European money market funds from multiple dimensions and shows the diversity of these funds — a diversity rooted in the historical developments of diverse European financial markets. The events of the financial crisis and liquidity squeeze confronting European money...

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...

The economic history of the United States is riddled with financial crises and banking panics. During the nineteenth-century, eight major such episodes occurred. In the period following World War II, some believed that these crises would no longer happen, and that the U.S. had reached a time of...

Contrary to popular belief, the history of central banking begins much earlier than 1800. Many current issues of central bank policy can be traced back to the public giro banks of the 15th century, and have been discussed in numerous essays at least since the 17th century. Are the same debates...

This paper provides a new interpretation of the early rise of rating agencies in the United States (initially known as Mercantile Agencies). We explain this American exceptionality through an inductive approach that revisits the conventional parallel with the UK. In contrast with earlier...

This article compares the direct regulation of hedge funds in the U.S. prior to the Dodd-Frank Act with the direct regulatory measures to address potential systemic risks of hedge funds ensued in its aftermaths. The direct regulation involves regulatory measures focusing immediately on the...

In this study, I investigate the performance of five categories of U.S. domestic equity mutual funds during the recessions of 1990 and 2001 and during the 12 months following each recession. I show that recessions identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) are not all the same...