Banking is based on two fundamentally irreconcilable functions: safekeeping of deposits and relending of deposits. Safekeeping is meant to be a risk-free function, but using deposits to fund loans inevitably poses risk to deposits, thereby undermining the safekeeping function. The expensive,...

In this chapter, we consider the role of duties-to-serve in the housing finance market -- the patchwork of obligations on lending institutions to reach out to traditionally underserved communities and borrowers. We review the current regulatory framework and history of various duties-to-serve,...

The mortgage foreclosure crisis raises legal questions as important as its economic impact. Questions that were straightforward and uncontroversial a generation ago today threaten the stability of a $13 trillion mortgage market: Who has standing to foreclose? If a foreclosure was done...

The U.S. housing finance system presents a conundrum for the scholar of regulation because it defies description using the traditional regulatory vocabulary of command-and-control, taxation, subsidies, cap-and-trade permits, and litigation. Instead, since the New Deal, the housing finance market...

There is little consensus as to the cause of the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. Numerous explanations exist: misguided monetary policy; a global savings surplus; government policies encouraging affordable homeownership; irrational consumer expectations of rising...

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...

This is a short analysis of the Taxpayer Protection and Responsible Resolution Act (TPRRA) of 2018, a proposal to amend the Bankruptcy Code add a new Chapter 14 authorizing a single-point-of-entry style resolution of failed bank holding companies. The analysis shows that TPRRA would dangerously...

Purdue Pharma, the bankruptcy drug manufacturer at the center of the opioid crisis, entered into a controversial settlement of its civil and criminal liability for opioid harms with the Department of Justice. The settlement contained an unusual feature—a “poison pill,” that effectively...

This Article argues that private ordering of fraud loss liability in payment card systems is likely to be socially inefficient because it does not reflect Coasean bargaining among payment card network participants. Instead, loss allocation rules are the result of the most powerful party in the...