The FinReg Pod

Art Wilmarth is Professor Emeritus at The George Washington University Law School. In this episode, Art discusses his new paper, "It's Time to Regulate Stablecoins as Deposits and Require Their Issuers to Be FDIC-Insured Banks." Specifically, Art explains why he believes that stablecoin issuers and distributors should be required to become FDIC-insured banks and the other steps he would like to se...

Hilary Allen is a professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law and author of "Driverless Finance: Fintech's Impact on Financial Stability." In this episode, Hilary discusses the financial stability risks associated with the rise of crypto-assets, fintech payments, and machine learning; and why she believes regulators should be guided by the precautionary principle in addre...

Sara Greene is a sociologist and legal scholar whose research utilizes qualitative empirical methods to study the relationship between law, poverty, and inequality. In this episode, Sara discusses her recent paper "Stealing (Identity) From the Poor." Sara discusses why low-income individuals are particularly vulnerable to identity theft, why the existing regulatory regime around data breaches igno...

In this special look-back episode, Tim Swanson breaks down major developments in the cryptocurrency market in 2021. Tim is head of market intelligence at London-based blockchain company Clearmatics and is the founder and director of research at tech advisory firm Post Oak Labs .   Tim's Twitter: @ofnumbers GFMC's Twitter: @DukeGFMC Lee's Twitter: @leereiners The FinReg Blog: https://sites.law.duke...

Costas Stephanou and Matteo Aquilina from the Financial Stability Board (FSB) discuss the fragilities in the non-bank financial intermediation sector that were revealed in March 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the work of the FSB to address these risks. Non-bank financial intermediaries include money market mutual funds, other open-ended funds, asset managers, non-bank corporate b...

Chris Giancarlo served as the thirteenth Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. While leading the CFTC, Chris earned the nickname "CryptoDad" for his call on Congress to respect a new generation's interest in cryptocurrency, an experience he details in his excellent new book "CryptoDad: The Fight for the Future of Money." Chris is also the co-founder of the digital dollar proje...

Laura Parisi is team lead at the European Central Bank Climate Change Center and Spyros Alogoskoufis is a financial stability and stress test expert at the European Central Bank. Together, they spearheaded the ECB's economy-wide climate stress test which was released in September. The exercise tested the impact of climate change on more than four million firms worldwide and 1,600 Euro-area banks u...

Ari Redbord is the head of legal and government affairs for the blockchain intelligence firm, TRM Labs. Prior to joining TRM Labs, Ari held public sector roles involving cryptocurrency and national security at the Department of Justice and U.S. Department of the Treasury. In this episode, Ari discusses the first time he encountered cryptocurrency as a federal prosecutor, how crypto is being used t...

Winston Ma is the author of "The Digital War: How China's Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace." The book details the profound global implications as China's digital economy moves from a consumer-focused phase to an enterprise-oriented one, with a focus on the Internet of Things, AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and data analytics. In this episode, Winston discusses the ri...

Liam Vaughan is a senior reporter with Bloomberg and Businessweek magazine in London. His article, 'Most Americans Today Believe the Stock Market Is Rigged, and They're Right,' appeared on the October 4 th cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. Liam is a returning guest to the podcast and joins Lee to discuss his new article that examines the disturbing behavior of US corporate executives that trade the...

Alicia Seiger is Managing Director of the Stanford University Sustainable Finance Initiative and Lynn Schenk is Director at the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School. They both served on the California Climate-Related Risk Disclosure Advisory Group. In this episode, Alicia and Lynn discuss the advisory group's recent report, "Developing Climate Risk Disclosure Practices fo...

Tariq Fancy is Founder and CEO of The Rumie Initiative and the former Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock. His recent three-part series, "The Secret Diary of a Sustainable Investor", argues that ESG/sustainable investing is intellectually bankrupt and is damaging to the most important causes it purports to support. Tariq joins The FinReg Pod to discuss how he went from...

Pat Parkinson is a senior fellow at the Bank Policy Institute and project director for the Group of Thirty's Working Group on Treasury Market Liquidity. In this episode, Pat discusses the Treasury market meltdown in March 2020 and the Group of Thirty's recommendations to address key Treasury market fragilities. Specifically, Pat explains why the Federal Reserve's standing repo facility, launched o...

Mike Konczal is Director of Macroeconomic Analysis and Progressive Thought at the Roosevelt Institute. His recent article "Completing the Revolution in Macroeconomic Policy," is part of a three-part series from Roosevelt Institute staff that lay out their agendas for the next Federal Reserve term across three different issues: corporate power, climate change, and macroeconomics. In this episode, M...

Art Wilmarth is Professor Emeritus at The George Washington University Law School. In this episode, Art discusses his new paper " The Pandemic Crisis Shows that the World Remains Trapped in a 'Global Doom Loop' of Financial Instability, Rising Debt Levels, and Escalating Bailouts ." Art explains the consequences of the Federal Reserve's backstop of the corporate bond market during the pandemic, wh...

Congressman Mike Levin is one of the leading voices on climate policy in the U.S. Congress. He serves on the House Committee on Natural Resources as well as the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and in this episode, he talks about the findings from the latest UN climate report, the climate provisions he would like to see in the proposed $3.5 trillion dollar budget reconciliation packag...

Zach Neumann is the co-founder and executive director of the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project in Denver, Colorado. Zach is also the co-author of a recent paper from the Aspen Institute titled "With Federal Moratorium Expiring, 15 million people at Risk of Eviction." In this episode, Zach discusses the innovative model his organization developed to quickly disburse rental assistance funds, the cha...

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a cooperative effort among 11 northeastern and mid-Atlantic states to cap and reduce  carbon dioxide  emissions from the power sector. In this episode, RGGI Vice Chair and Maryland Secretary of the Environment, Ben Grumbles, breaks down RGGI's origins and what it takes for states to join the initiative, the auction process to allocate emissions allo...

LIBOR has been called the world's most important number, which is why getting the entire financial system to move away from LIBOR is such a herculean effort. In this episode, Manuel Frey and Jane O'Brien discuss the role of regulators in facilitating an orderly transition away from LIBOR, the strengths and weaknesses of regulators' preferred alternative to LIBOR, and the potential for rival benchm...

Thomas Vartanian is the author of the recently released book: 200 Years of American Financial Panics: Crashes, Recessions, Depressions, and the Technology that Will Change It All. In this episode, Vartanian reflects on his experience responding to the S&L crisis and how that informed his view on the role of government in contributing to financial risks, what lessons the government failed to learn...

President Biden plans to pay for his $2 trillion infrastructure package by raising corporate tax rates and imposing a global minimum tax of 21%. In this episode, Peter Barnes breaks down how a global minimum tax would work in practice and the challenges involved in negotiating an international tax agreement. Peter is a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law and the Duke Center for International Devel...

Investor Bill Hwang set off a storm in the stock market in March when his firm, Archegos Capital Management, and its banks, began liquidating huge positions in blue-chip companies that left their counterparties with $10bn in losses. In this episode, Duke Law professors Gina-Gail Fletcher, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Jim Cox, Lee Reiners, and Lawrence Baxter explain why Archegos failed, who got hurt, an...

Financial services regulatory reform will continue to be active these next three plus years, with the Biden administration focused on activity at the intersection of financial regulation and social policy. However, the pace and tenor of change under the Biden administration will be heavily influenced by the leadership of and senior personnel at the federal prudential and market regulators. In this...

For 18 years, Kerry Killinger was CEO of Washington Mutual - a lender in the Pacific Northwest that he grew into the sixth largest bank in the country prior to its collapse in September of 2008. Kerry, along with his wife Linda, recently published " Nothing is Too Big to Fail: How the Last Financial Crisis Informs Today ." In this episode, the Killingers discuss why they believe Jamie Dimon and JP...

While the pandemic has devastated minority communities, a small handful of wealthy, billionaire landlords are cashing in to the tune of millions. In this episode, Sara Myklebust from Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative and Patrick Woodall from Americans for Financial Reform discuss the findings from their new report: "Cashing in Our Homes."  The report, produced by Bargaining for the Co...