Courses

    This course examines the regulation of financial intermediaries, both to ensure systemic stability and to pursue consumer protection or other aims. Most of the course is devoted to federal regulation of banks, bank holding companies, and financial holding companies. Topics include restrictions on activities of banks and their affiliates, lending limits, capital adequacy requirements, community reinvestment requirements, privacy concerns, electronic banking, geographic and structural constraints, bank supervision, and failed banks. With the market and legal changes of the past decade, the traditional barriers between commercial banks and other financial institutions have been substantially dismantled. Thus the course also examines relevant topics in the regulation of other financial intermediaries. The course begins with the basic economic concepts applicable to financial intermediaries and ends with a consideration of the substantive and procedural challenges of regulating financial conglomerates that include several forms of financial intermediaries.