The most recent round of state budget crises has resulted in calls to permit states to file for bankruptcy in order to restructure and reduce their financial obligations. This Article argues that these proposals are misguided because states' financial distress is primarily a political problem...

The Dodd-Frank Act's “skin-in-the-game” credit risk retention require- ment is the major reform of the securitization market following the housing bubble. Skin-in-the-game mandates that securitizers retain a 5% interest in their securitizations. The premise behind skin-in-the-game is that it...

Systemic risk - the possibility that an individual firm's failure will result in broad damages to the economy as a whole - is the epitome of financial crisis. Bailouts of troubled firms have long been the standard response to systemic risk. Yet, bailouts suffer from problems of political...

There is little consensus as to the cause of the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. Numerous explanations exist: misguided monetary policy; a global savings surplus; government policies encouraging affordable homeownership; irrational consumer expectations of rising...

Fictitious scare statistics have featured prominently in recent debates over consumer credit policy. The latest example is David Evans and Joshua Wright's statistical claims about the impact of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act on the cost and availability of consumer credit and...

This Essay argues for the introduction of public competition in the payment card clearance market as a method of addressing suboptimal competition in an industry with extremely high barriers to entry. The Federal Reserve competes with private parties for check, wire transfer, and ACH clearance,...

The worst financial and economic crisis to hit the world's richest economies since the Great Depression inspired a flood of scholarship that straddled the disciplines of law and macroeconomics. With few exceptions, this crisis scholarship did not set out to build a new interdisciplinary movement...

This Article argues that the student loan crisis is due not to the scale of student loan debt, but to the federal education finance system's failure to utilize its existing mechanisms for progressive, income-based payments and debt cancellation. These mechanisms can make investment in higher...