Since 1970, the Fifth District has seen changes in state laws governing bank branching and interstate banking and in federal laws governing bank holding company activities. Now that branching within states has been liberalized in all Fifth District jurisdictions, the major field for future...

Deposit insurance, while reducing the threat of bank runs, also lessens bankers' incentives to control risks. Reforms of the deposit insurance system are necessary to discourage excessive risk taking such as characterized the recent S&L crisis. The adoption of market value accounting, early...

Gains from sales of securities and lower loan loss previsions helped bring higher profits to large Fifth District commercial banks in 1986. At the same time, small- and medium-sized bank profits fell slightly in the District from the previous year. As in the past few years, Fifth District banks...

When a money market instrument is traded, the clearing and settlement process establishes the change in ownership. Because the process involves both costs and risks, money market participants have developed means of making clearing and settlement more efficient and less risky

As the severity of the problems facing the federal deposit insurance funds become more obvious, the chorus of support for some form of market value accounting is growing. Proponents cite the benefits of increased disclosure and the discipline such accounting would bring about. Opponents argue...

Rent control is one of the few policy issues on which there is a general agreement among economists. Economic theory predicts, and few economists have tried to dispute, that imposing rent controls on a housing market is likely to lead to rental housing shortages and general deterioration of...

Microeconomic theory predicts that rent controls will lead to greater housing quality deterioration than would have been the case in an uncontrolled market. However, empirical analyses of rent control have concentrated on income distribution effects. This study tests the hypothesis of quality...

When asked about the most important developments in banking in the decade of the 1980s, most people are likely to point to the thrift debacle or to losses on loans to less developed countries. But arguably more influential has been a benign development, namely, the rise of interstate banking. In...