The financial crisis has revealed fatal institutional and structural deficits at the finance market. Politics has reacted to the financial crisis with a sea of legal bills and regulations. But all regulating efforts are merely system-imminent reparation measures and do not solve the core...

Facing a shortage of U.S. dollars and a growing need to support their dollar-denominated assets during the financial crisis, international firms increasingly turned to the foreign exchange swap market and other secured funding sources. An analysis of the ensuing strains in the swap market shows...

Who could have thought that banks would become nationalised, that state debts would reach historical levels, that bulge bracket investment banks would go bankrupt and that the masters of the universe would be so widely vilified? Each in their own way, the four reflections collected in this...

Reforming regulation of the financial sector is currently among the most immediate concerns of domestic and international policymakers. Proposals for such reform are proliferating, and the official sector appears committed to adopting at least some meaningful reforms in the near-term. Broadly...

The paper aims to examine the new regulatory framework of project finance in the economics of banking firms. In particular, the paper investigates the uniqueness of the project finance, the significant importance of the project finance in bank activity, and the role of the new bank capital...

We measure speculation in the CDS market and investigate its determinants. The CDS volume on a firm that exceeds its outstanding debt (= naked CDS) indicates speculation since hedging can be ruled out. Using weekly CDS trading volume data for actively traded U.S. firms during 2008-2012, we...

The syndicated loan market allows a more efficient geographical and institutional sharing of risk. Large US and European banks originate loans for emerging market borrowers and allocate them to local banks. Euro area banks have expanded pan-European lending and have found funding outside the...

The quality of newly originated subprime mortgages had been visibly deteriorating for some time before the window for such loans was shut in 2007. Nevertheless, a bankruptcy court's directed ex post examination of New Century Financial, one of the largest originators of subprime mortgages,...

Over the last couple of years large, internationally active financial institutions have engaged in increasingly complex and diverse activities. This tendency towards greater complexity, together with the experience of recent financial market crises, has reinforced an already large and growing...

This article reviews the recent collapse of global securitisation markets and the loss of investor confidence in them. It then sets out measures that could be taken to revive and strengthen the securitisation process, including mechanisms based on retention requirements for originators. It ends...