In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...

Recently, the bank regulatory agencies have adopted capital forbearance programs to permit some troubled agriculture and energy banks to operate temporarily with capital levels below the regulatory minimum requirement. In a world with federal deposit insurance and a lender of last resort, bank...

At the time of the Continental Illinois National Bank insolvency, bank regulators considered some commercial banks "too large to fail" (TLTF) and were reluctant both to legally fail such banks and to impose pro rata losses on any of the uninsured creditors of these insolvent banks and their...

The existence of a difference between the yield to maturity of a coupon bond and the expected holding period return on a coupon bond, referred to as coupon bias, is well recognized. This paper discusses the nature of coupon bias for mortgages, estimates the magnitude of the bias under different...

In recent years a number of alternative types of residential mortgage plans (i.e., alternative to the fixed-rate level-payment mortgage) have been proposed, and some of these have been available in various parts of the country. The most often proposed innovation has been the variable rate...

Banking and currency crises have done severe economic damage in many countries in recent years. This article examines the causes and characteristics of these crises and the public policies intended to prevent them or mitigate their adverse consequences.