Recent events have made it clear that the deposit insurance system is broken. We have a de jure cap on insurance set at $250,000 but, de facto, for any bank with at least $100 billion in assets, uninsured depositors are very unlikely to take losses. It is time for Congress to advance legislation...

In the most recent decade, the European Union has shown itself to be less robust than globalists imagined. Globalists believed that supranationality was weatherproof – that it would always outperform national alternatives and would survive adversity. Economic stagnation and Brexit belied these...

This paper deals with the relation between excessive risk taking and capital structure in banks. Examining a quarterly dataset of U.S. banks between 1993 and 2010, we find that equity is valued higher when more risky portfolios are chosen when leverage is high, and that more risk taking has a...

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms’ leverage carry over to...

The FDIC used cross-guarantees to close thirty-eight subsidiaries of First RepublicBank Corporation in 1988 and eighteen subsidiaries of First City Bancorporation in 1992 when lead banks from each of these Texas-based bank holding companies were declared insolvent. I use this exogenous failure...