Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- An Accident? -- This Book -- Financial Regulation Matters -- Some Final Introductory Remarks -- Road Map -- Chapter 2. Regulating Finance Is Hard to Do -- Introduction -- Shareholders versus Debt Holders: The Essence of Regulatory Complexity -- Three Approaches to Financial Regulation -- Adam Smith and James Madison on Making the Guardians Work for Us -- Innovation and Financial Regulation -- International Financial Regulation: A Sisyphean Task -- Complex but Not Hopeless -- Chapter 3. Incentives Run Amok -- Why Shareholders Don't Rule -- Compensation and Incentives -- Going for Growth in Mortgage Lending -- Harder Evidence -- The Special Role of Ratings Organizations -- Risk Managers and Risk Models: Where Were They? -- Chapter 4. How US Regulators Encouraged the Financial Crisis -- Greenspan's Fed -- The Fed, Credit Default Swaps, and Bank Capital -- Born versus Greenspan, Rubin, and Levitt: Guess Who Won? Guess Who Lost? -- The SEC: See Nothing, Know Nothing, Do Nothing -- The Credit- Rating Agencies: The SEC, Congress, and Everyone Else -- The FDIC: People Are People -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- Some Final Remarks -- Chapter 5. American Crisis? Ain't Necessarily So -- The Luck of the Irish -- The Run on the Rock -- An Icelandic Meltdown -- Notes on Other Crises -- Failure Is Not Inevitable -- Chapter 6. Been Down This Road Many Times Before -- Crisis . . . Financial Reform . . . Crisis . . . Financial Reform . . . -- A Solution to Banking Problems: Create National Banks and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency? -- A Solution to Systemic Banking Problems: Create the Federal Reserve System? -- A Still Better Solution to Preventing Bank Runs and Costly Bank Failures: Create a Federal Deposit Insurance System?.

A Solution to Inadequate Securities Disclosure and Underregulated Investment Banks: Create the Securities and Exchange Commission? -- A Solution to Promoting Home Ownership: Create New Federal Housing Institutions and a New Federal Housing Regulator? -- Summing Up -- Savings and Loans: A Case Study of Financial Regulatory Failure -- Ticking Time Bomb -- The Savings and Loan Industry Plunges into Insolvency -- Gambling for Resurrection -- Commercial Banks Did Not Entirely Escape Problems -- Summary and Conclusions -- Chapter 7. More of the Same: Post 2007-2009 Financial Crisis Regulation -- The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act -- A New Guardian of the Financial System -- Consumers Get Their Own Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- No More Taxpayer Bailouts: Too Big to Fail Firms Will Now Be Allowed to Fail -- Summary and Conclusions about Dodd-Frank -- Basel I and II Didn't Do the Job, So Now Basel III -- Minimum Capital Requirements and Phase- in Timetable -- Overall Summary and Conclusions -- Appendix: Additional Aspects of Dodd-Frank -- Investors Get More Protections, and New Constraints Are Put on Financial Firm Compensation -- Given the Failure of AIG, What Happens to the Insurance Industry? -- Deposit Insurance Limits Increased -- States Now Serve as a Check on Selected Federal Regulatory Power -- The "Volcker Rule" -- Parent Companies of FDIC Institutions Are Required to Be a Source of Strength -- Industrial Loan Corporations: What Are They and Why Are They in the Law? -- Chapter 8. Making the Guardians of Finance Work for Us -- The Guardians of Finance Did Not Work for Us -- Why Don't the Guardians of Finance Work for Us? -- Current Reform Efforts Do Not Fully Address the Root Causes of the Problem -- The Sentinel -- Alternatives to, Critiques of, and Reflections on the Sentinel -- Conclusions -- Glossary -- Notes.

Index -- About the Authors.