Following the 2008 financial crisis, countercyclical regulation emerged as one of the most promising breakthroughs in years to halting destructive cycles of booms and busts. This new approach to systemic risk posits that financial regulation should clamp down during economic expansions and ease...

The state-based model of U.S. insurance regulation has been remarkably enduring to date, in part because the traditional rationales for a greater federal role – efficiency, uniformity, and consumer protection – have not succeeded in displacing it. However, the 2008 financial crisis, the...

The financial crisis of 2008 gave rise to renewed discussion about whether financial innovations should undergo higher scrutiny for potential harm and, if so, what type? In this Article, the authors propose a new system for monitoring financial innovations through a system of registration, data...

From 2007 through 2011, the United States housing market suffered a severe imbalance in supply and demand due to an excessive number both of foreclosed homes and homes awaiting foreclosure in the shadow housing inventory. Foreclosure prevention can help reduce the shadow housing inventory by...

The number of modifications to distressed residential loans has been subpar to date compared to the number of foreclosures. This raises concerns about the presence of artificial barriers to loan modifications in situations where foreclosure should be avoidable. Numerous theories have been...

Virtually no attention has been paid to the problem of cyclicality in debates over access to mortgage credit, despite its importance as a driver of tight credit. Housing markets are prone to booms accompanied by bubbles in mortgage credit in which lenders cut underwriting standards, leading to...

After existing regulatory systems failed to prevent the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a sweeping reform designed to alleviate the crisis and prevent its recurrence. Out of this Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...

In the wake of the stalled Johnson-Crapo bill, the overarching goal of housing finance reform continues to be the efficient provision of long-term fixed-rate mortgages to credit-worthy borrowers in all markets throughout the business cycle. This Issue Brief analyzes three newly-proposed plans...

Since the financial crisis, policymakers have developed two different approaches to systemic risk arising from nonbank financial firms such as insurance companies and investment banks. The first, dubbed an entity-based approach, empowers a public entity like the Financial Stability Oversight...

On March 7, 2018, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, under Acting Director Mick Mulvaney, issued a Request for Information eliciting public comment on its rulemaking processes. This response expresses concern that under its new leadership, the Bureau is retreating from its commitment to...