The policy debate on whether to strengthen or to remove the legal barriers between banking and commerce has paid little attention to what the practical effects of removing the barriers would be. To help answer this question, this article, the first part of a two-part study, provides an overview...

In the first part (in the previous issue of Economic Review) of this two-part study, the authors identified a number of possible benefits from combining banking and commerce, including portfolio diversification, the creation of internal capital markets, and economies of scale and scope. This...

The author suggests that the 2008 financial crisis was the culmination of an acceleratting and inherently unstable process of financial market evolution. He argues that markets are not well organized to manage the power that financial assets have to generate emotion and their wider effect on...

This paper examines the implications of the global financial crisis of 2007-10 for reform of the global financial architecture, in particular the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board and their interaction. These two institutions are not fully comparable, but they must...

The era of US state branching deregulation started in 1970 and ended up with the enactment of the Riegle Neal Act of 1994. One of the purposes of the branching restriction was to avoid bank concentration. The following paper addresses the influence of the state deregulation on commercial...

Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of dollar's double role of national and international currency. This is the Triffin dilemma. The paper shows how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the...