Oxford Business Law Blog

Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the communications channel by which an increasing number of commercial and financial transactions take place. But already in the 1990s, it was clear that the...

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...

The regulatory requirement for banks to hold capital is related to the safety net afforded by (often implicit) government guarantees. Regulators are also concerned about the possibility of systemic...

As knowledge of cryptocurrencies becomes more widespread, the number of the people using them grows. Their attractiveness is due in part to their decentralized, peer-to-peer structure. This makes...

Since the global financial crisis, an increasing number of countries, including the United States, have been requiring most derivatives contracts to be cleared and settled through central...

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 showed how interconnectedness among financial institutions can pose systemic risk to the financial system. When a highly interconnected institution becomes...

In a seminal work, Modigliani and Miller pointed out that, in a world with no asymmetries of information, no transaction costs, no taxes and no costs of bankruptcy, the value of the firm is...

In our recent ECGI-Law working paper, ‘The Law and Economics of Shadow Banking’, we discuss the economic case for regulating shadow banking. Our paper asks three questions. First, what is shadow...

In a new working paper, ‘The Renminbi and Systemic Risk’, I argue that the internationalization of China’s currency, the renminbi (‘RMB’), is arising in ways that depart considerably from historical...

The current debate over the future of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (and specifically, its SIFI designation power) is missing an important point. The question should not be whether the...

The modern financial system is highly interconnected. Institutions engage in a diverse range of transactions and contracts with each other. Examples include the interbank lending market and the over-...

A bit of comparative analysis, like this, might help us think about these questions. Across the EU, the US and (at least until the impact of Brexit is felt) the UK, we see varying degrees of...

According to a common narrative, in addition to inadequate capital and liquidity, the failure of banks in the financial crisis also reflected their poor governance. By ‘governance’, I mean broadly...

The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has triggered a lively debate on bank regulation. Tougher capital adequacy requirements and more restrictions on bankers’ pay have been two issues that have...

In Rethinking Corporate Governance for a Bondholder Financed, Systemically Risky World, available here, I argue that including bondholders in the governance of systemically important firms not only...

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer has struck down the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s (FSOC) designation of the insurer MetLife Inc. as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI...