This short address attempts to provide a succinct overview, critiquing how well the Dodd-Frank Act identifies and manages systemic risk. Keynote address given at AGEP Advanced Policy Institute on Financial Services Regulation, George Mason University, March 10, 2011

Ideal financial regulation would work ex ante, to prevent financial failures. Once a failure occurs, there may already be economic damage, and it may be difficult to stop the failure from spreading and becoming systemic. The reality, though, is that preventing financial failures should be only...

The global financial crisis demonstrated the inability and unwillingness of financial market participants to safeguard the stability of the financial system. It also highlighted the enormous direct and indirect costs of addressing systemic crises after they have occurred, as opposed to...

A major focus of finance is reducing risk on investments, a goal commonly achieved by dispersing the risk among numerous investors. Sometimes, however, risk dispersion can cause investors to underestimate and under-protect against risk. Risk can even be so widely dispersed that rational...

The securitization of subprime mortgage loans is widely viewed as a root cause of the financial crisis. This lecture balances the costs and benefits of securitization, focusing on what went wrong and on what needs to be fixed to curtail securitization's abuses and make it viable again as an...

This lecture examines the causes of the global financial crisis, showing it was triggered by market failures, not by financial institution failures, and arguing that any regulatory framework for managing systemic risk must address markets as well as institutions. The lecture also analyzes how...

Complexity is the greatest challenge to 21st Century financial regulation, having the potential to impair markets and investments in several interrelated ways. Furthermore, complexity can cause failures that individual market participants cannot, or will not have incentive to, remedy. These...

The BP Gulf oil spill and the Toyota car recalls have highlighted an important legal anomaly that has been overlooked by scholars — judicial inconsistency and confusion in ruling whether to compensate for the loss in market value of wrongfully affected property. This article seeks to...

Systemic risk management is at the forefront of financial regulatory agendas worldwide. The global financial crisis was a powerful demonstration of the inability and unwillingness of financial market participants to carry out the task of safeguarding the stability of the financial system. It...

Covered bonds, which have been part of European finance since the time of Frederick the Great, are now being widely touted as the answer to securitization's imperfections. There is great confusion, though, about the nature of covered bonds and their relationship to secured bond financing and...