“Safe assets” is a catch-all term for financial contracts that market participants treat as if they were risk-free. These may include government debt, AAA corporate debt, bank debt, and asset-backed securities, among others. The International Monetary Fund estimated potential safe assets at...

Part I. The economics and legal history of bubbles -- Part II. The regulatory instability hypothesis -- Part III. Fighting bubbles, feeding bubbles -- Part IV. The panic of 2007-2008 as master class in regulatory instability : the shadow banking bubble -- Part V. Lessons and solutions.

This article analyzes the effectiveness of proposed and actual securities, financial, and tax laws designed to prevent, or dampen the severity of asset price bubbles, including laws designed to mitigate excessive speculation. The article employs experimental asset market research to measure the...

This article proposes several simple financial market reforms that can help regulators both identify systemically risky institutions and mitigate the systemic risk associated with derivative trading, especially trading in credit derivatives such as credit default swaps.The Federal Reserve (or...