Financial regulation is most effective when it targets the origins of the problem it seeks to remedy. This is akin to the medical adage: treat the cause, not the symptom. Identifying the causal factors driving distress in financial markets is no easy task. One complication is that the cause might li...

When deposits are not completely insured, the presence of too big-to-fail (TBTF) banks alters the competitive landscape for depositors’ funds [...]

With the arrival of a new Congress and a new administration, change may be in store for current and former students who have borrowed to pay for higher education expenses. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump indicated a desire to ease the debt burden carried by former students, and Republicans at ti...

As the keynote speaker at a recent conference of the International Consortium on Government Financial Management held in Washington DC, I had the opportunity to discuss with representatives from over 40 countries one of the primary challenges facing governments around the world – citizen engagement.

In fragile economic times, the U.S. government occasionally enacts stimulus programs to provide a jolt to consumer spending. This was certainly the case during the Great Recession, when the government utilized both explicit stimulus programs, such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 200...

The GCFP invites guest blog submissions to encourage discussion of important financial policy issues. This first guest posting, by Bob Pozen, proposes a “Third Type of Retirement Plan” that would address some of the stresses in public sector defined benefit pension plans while preserving much of the...

On October 20, former Inter-American Development Bank Treasurer Søren Elbech visited the Golub Center for Finance and Policy for a lunchtime discussion with students and faculty. Drawing on his experience in capital markets...

Reverse mortgages are a financial innovation designed to help retirees free up the savings tied up in home equity without being forced to move. Access to those funds can make a big difference in the quality of life for house-rich, cash-poor, retirees. Yet the product has been slow to catch on. A new...

On July 1, 2016, the U.S. territory, which has been mired in a years-long debt crisis, failed to make good on $2 billion of bond payments due, triggering the worst default in its history. Puerto Rico’s governor Alejandro García Padilla has defended the decision to skip the full payment, emphasizing ...

Today the MIT CFP announced the winners of its first crowd-sourced contest, “What is a Systemically Important Financial Institution?” A collaboration between the MIT Center for Finance and Policy and the Harvard Crowd Innovation Laboratory, the contest was launched to generate new proposals to speci...