The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has long been plagued by scandals, mismanagement, and policy failures. Most recently, HUD’s subsidies and failed oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie [...]
The U.S. Constitution vests all the “legislative powers” it grants in Congress. The Supreme Court allows Congress to delegate some authority to executive officials provided an “intelligible principle” guides such [...]
The banking legislation of the 1930s took very little time to pass, was unusually comprehensive, and unusually responsive to public opinion. Ironically, the primary motivations for the main bank regulatory [...]
What is generally agreed is that subprime mortgages disproportionately contributed both to the severity of the crisis and to the size of losses imposed upon the taxpayer. What remains in [...]
The federal government recently placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government chartered, privately owned mortgage finance companies, in conservatorship. These two massive companies are profit driven, but as government-sponsored [...]
We document that trust in public institutions--and particularly trust in banks, business and government--has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature [...]
The United States’ market-government hybrid mortgage system is unique in the world. No other nation has such heavy government intervention in housing finance. This hybrid system nurtured the excessively risky [...]
The Basel regime is an international system of capital adequacy regulation designed to strengthen banks’ financial health and the safety and soundness of the financial system as a whole. It [...]
We assemble data on the structure of bank supervision, distinguishing supervision by the central bank from supervision by a nonbank governmental agency and independent from dependent governmental supervisors. Using observations [...]
More than 40 years ago, Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) guided the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) through Congress, seeking to improve the operations of the credit reporting industry. The complexities [...]