Columbia Law School
Sky Blog
Jeremy C. Kress
Macroprudential Financial Regulation Is a Myth
If you follow the financial press, you have probably seen coverage of the new bank capital requirements that federal regulators proposed last year. These rules would strengthen capital levels for the United States’ largest banks and thereby complete the implementation …
Reviving Bank Antitrust
Antitrust is back. The Chicago School relegated antitrust policy to obscurity during the latter half of the 20th century, but a new cohort of antimonopoly scholars has recently rekindled concerns about industrial consolidation and corporate “bigness.” This antitrust revival …
Who’s Looking Out for the Banks?
Two decades ago, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act’s Depression-era separation between commercial banking and other financial activities, paving the way for bank holding companies (BHCs) to expand into investment banking and insurance. At the time, some critics – most notably, …
Domesticating Foreign Finance
Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and other foreign banks played an outsized role in the 2008 financial crisis that cost U.S. households trillions of dollars of wealth. As credit markets froze, foreign banks’ U.S. offices experienced extreme stress and …
Too Many to Fail: Against Community Bank Deregulation
If there was one thing most people could agree on after the 2008 financial crisis, it was that “too-big-to-fail” banks were to blame for the market crash. This shared understanding was accompanied by a corollary: Small banks were not the …
The Unwise and Illegal Deregulation of Prudential Financial
On October 18, federal regulators released the largest U.S. insurance group, Prudential Financial, Inc., from enhanced government oversight. Prudential had been the last remaining systemically important financial institution (SIFI)—a designation Congress created in the Dodd-Frank Act for nonbank financial companies …