In the last two decades U.S. banks have become systematically less profitable and riskier as nonbank competition has eroded the profitability of banks' traditional activities. Bank failures, insignificant from 1934, the date the Glass-Steagall Act was passed, until 1980, rose exponentially in...

The governance rules mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley, and the SEC regulations thereunder, were in direct response to many of the specific misdeeds of the Enron, WorldCom and other scandals, leaving corporate lawyers scrambling to keep their clients in technical compliance, but wondering whether it...