Shadow banking is growing rapidly in a number of developing countries, including China where it recently was estimated at around 20 trillion yuan (which is approximately a third the size of China's bank - lending market). The shadow banking sector in these countries is typically weakly...

Many of the world’s banks have operations, if not branches or agencies, in the United States. When these banks fail, their U.S. operations and assets are subject to a confused, and confusing, patchwork of insolvency laws, both federal and state. This essay examines that legal patchwork, asking...

Covered bonds, traditionally associated with European finance since the time of Frederick the Great, are now becoming an important part of U.S., Canadian, and Asian finance. In these jurisdictions, market observers and government officials perceive the safety of covered bonds as an antidote for...

The recent financial woes of Greece and other nations are reinvigorating the debate over whether to bail out defaulting countries or, instead, restructure their debt. Bailouts are expensive, in the case of Greece costing potentially hundreds of billions of euros. But a bailout was virtually...

In a prior article, Professor Schwarcz examined the factors that differentiate Enron's questionable use of off-balance sheet special purpose entities, (SPEs) from the trillions of dollars of "legitimate" securitization and other structured-finance transactions that use SPEs. The presence of...