Never Again,\u27 Again: A Functional Examination of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

Despite the benefit of five years to heal its wounds, the United States remains hobbled from the devastating economic injuries of the 2007-08 global financial crisis. Families across the country still struggle with overwhelming debt and debilitating joblessness. The financial innovations that were once seen as a path to broader homeownership and greater financial equality nearly led to a once-unthinkable catastrophe, and ironically, have worked to widen the gap between rich and poor. These events took many top business leaders and regulators by surprise. After the crisis abated, legislators and other policymakers sought to understand how a financial crisis of such severity could arise undetected in one of the world\u27s most advanced and well-regulated economies. To this end, in May 2009 Congress created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission ( FCIC ). The FCIC was composed of commissioners with national recognition and significant depth of experience in such fields as banking, regulation of markets, taxation, finance, economics, consumer protection, and housing, and Congress charged it with analyzing the causes of the global financial crisis. After an eighteen-month investigation, during which the FCIC\u27s commissioners and staff reviewed millions of pages of documents, interviewed more than 700 witnesses, and held 19 days of public hearings (p. xi), the FCIC made public its book-length final report, titled The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States. The Report attributed the crisis to widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision (p. xviii); dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management at many systemically important financial institutions (p. xviii); excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency (p. xix); the government\u27s ill prepar[ation] for the crisis, and its inconsistent response (p. xxi); and a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics (p. xxii). Though commissioned for submission to the President and Congress, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report also attracted significant popular attention, spending two weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers\u27 List for Paperback Nonfiction

The Basel III Liquidity Coverage Ratio and Financial Stability

Banks and other financial institutions may increase the amount of credit available in the financial system by borrowing for short terms and lending for long terms. Though this maturity transformation is a useful and productive function of banks, it gives rise to the possibility that even prudently managed banks could fail due to a lack of liquid assets. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 revealed the extent to which the U.S. financial system is exposed to the risk of a system-wide failure from insufficient liquidity. Financial regulators from economies around the world have responded to the crisis by proposing new, internationally uniform bank liquidity standards, augmenting the existing Basel Capital Accord. This Note argues that a major component of these standards, the Liquidity Coverage Ratio requirement, may work to undermine the goals of effective liquidity regulation and instead contribute to issues of systemic risk

Never Again,\u27 Again: A Functional Examination of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

Despite the benefit of five years to heal its wounds, the United States remains hobbled from the devastating economic injuries of the 2007-08 global financial crisis. Families across the country still struggle with overwhelming debt and debilitating joblessness. The financial innovations that were once seen as a path to broader homeownership and greater financial equality nearly led to a once-unthinkable catastrophe, and ironically, have worked to widen the gap between rich and poor. These events took many top business leaders and regulators by surprise. After the crisis abated, legislators and other policymakers sought to understand how a financial crisis of such severity could arise undetected in one of the world\u27s most advanced and well-regulated economies. To this end, in May 2009 Congress created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission ( FCIC ). The FCIC was composed of commissioners with national recognition and significant depth of experience in such fields as banking, regulation of markets, taxation, finance, economics, consumer protection, and housing, and Congress charged it with analyzing the causes of the global financial crisis. After an eighteen-month investigation, during which the FCIC\u27s commissioners and staff reviewed millions of pages of documents, interviewed more than 700 witnesses, and held 19 days of public hearings (p. xi), the FCIC made public its book-length final report, titled The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States. The Report attributed the crisis to widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision (p. xviii); dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management at many systemically important financial institutions (p. xviii); excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency (p. xix); the government\u27s ill prepar[ation] for the crisis, and its inconsistent response (p. xxi); and a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics (p. xxii). Though commissioned for submission to the President and Congress, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report also attracted significant popular attention, spending two weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers\u27 List for Paperback Nonfiction

An Efficient Metaheuristic for Dynamic Network Design and Message Routing

The implementation of Net-centric warfare presents major challenges in terms of effectively and efficiently delivering critical information across the Global Information Grid. In many cases, the amount of information requested will exceed the capabilities of the network. One challenge is to dynamically design the network (assign transceivers) to maximize the amount of required information that can be transmitted and the quality of service for those transmissions - to best implement the communications tasking order. The problem is as follows: given a list of required message traffic, to include source, destination, size, and priority, design the network to maximize the delivery of the message traffic based on message priority and quality of service. Once the network is designed, the routing for the messages must be determined. Due to the dynamic nature of the problem and the combinatorial explosion in size as new network nodes are added, a quick-running heuristic approach is needed. In this research, metaheuristic to dynamically design the network based on the projected message traffic requirements and to efficiently route the required messages on the network to maximize priority of messages successfully delivered and the quality of service of the delivery. The meta-heuristic is tested against previous efforts and is shown to generate high quality solutions in a very short amount of time

In Situ Quenching and Post-Polymerization Modification of Telechelic Polyisobutylene

Polyisobutylene (PIB) is a saturated hydrocarbon elastomer that can only be produced by cationic polymerization. The water-initiated, chain transfer controlled synthesis conducted on an industrial scale produces monofunctional PIB with mixed olefin end groups. Living cationic techniques produce mono- and di-functional telechelic PIB. In situ quenching is the process of adding functional molecules to the polymerization reactor after all monomer is consumed. These quencher species bond to the chain ends, installing their latent functionality onto the polymer chain. To date, all quenchers utilized have been soft π-nucleophiles. In the first project, free thiols, both aromatic and aliphatic, are shown to be effective quenchers of living PIB. These soft nucleophiles lack π electrons, but are sufficiently nucleophilic to directly attack a carbocation in an SN1 reaction and form sulfide bonds with the polymer chain. By utilizing functional thiols, functional PIBs can be produced directly from the polymerization reactor, with no post-polymerization modification. The second project utilized an established alkoxybenzene quencher, 3-bromopropoxy benzene, to produce bromine-terminated PIB. This material was then reacted with several functionalized carboxylates to displace the terminal bromine unit and produce PIBs with acrylate, methacrylate, and hydroxyl end groups. The fourth chapter used two approaches to generate hydroxyl-terminated PIB. The first used an in situ quenching/deblocking sequence with living PIB to produce phenol-terminated PIB. The second used exo-olefin PIB in a radical thiol-ene reaction with 2-mercaptoethanol to produce aliphatic hydroxyl-terminated PIB. These functional PIBs are reacted with acid halides to produce telechelic PIB-based macromers and macroinitiators for radical copolymerizations

Rough-Cut Capacity Planning in Multimodal Freight Transportation Networks

A main challenge in transporting cargo for United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) is in mode selection or integration. Demand for cargo is time sensitive and must be fulfilled by an established due date. Since these due dates are often inflexible, commercial carriers are used at an enormous expense, in order to fill the gap in organic transportation asset capacity. This dissertation develops a new methodology for transportation capacity assignment to routes based on the Resource Constrained Shortest Path Problem (RCSP). Routes can be single or multimodal depending on the characteristics of the network, delivery timeline, modal capacities, and costs. The difficulty of the RCSP requires use of metaheuristics to produce solutions. An Ant Colony System to solve the RCSP is developed in this dissertation. Finally, a method for generating near Pareto optimal solutions with respect to the objectives of cost and time is developed

The Basel III Liquidity Coverage Ratio and Financial Stability

Banks and other financial institutions may increase the amount of credit available in the financial system by borrowing for short terms and lending for long terms. Though this maturity transformation is a useful and productive function of banks, it gives rise to the possibility that even prudently managed banks could fail due to a lack of liquid assets. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 revealed the extent to which the U.S. financial system is exposed to the risk of a system-wide failure from insufficient liquidity. Financial regulators from economies around the world have responded to the crisis by proposing new, internationally uniform bank liquidity standards, augmenting the existing Basel Capital Accord. This Note argues that a major component of these standards, the Liquidity Coverage Ratio requirement, may work to undermine the goals of effective liquidity regulation and instead contribute to issues of systemic risk

Unclaimed Financial Assets and the Promotion of Microfinance

State governments can effectively promote domestic entrepreneurship in low-income communities and simultaneously fulfill their duties as conservator s of unclaimed property, by lending unclai med financial assets-in-trust at preferential interest rates to in-state microfinance providers. This plan presents an alternative to charitable contributions, though it does not resolve the tension between for-profit and not-for-profit microfinance providers. Such a scheme could be a significant funding source for many microfinance operations in the United States today. Even a small portion of the yearly intake of unclaimed assets would be substantial enough to support fully most microfinance loan portfolios. Also, reinvestment of unclaimed financial assets into the consumer financial system, rather than fiscal redeployment or traditional public fund investment, correctly counterbalances the contraction in consumer credit supply that occurs when these assets leave the balance sheets of financial institutions. Implementation of such a scheme may be accomplished by minor changes to current unclaimed property law

Nuisance Bird Control in Virginia

In the mid-1960s, State officials of Virginia recognized an increasing bird damage problem, yet no legislation existed that allowed any state agency the authority to initiate a nuisance bird control program. In 1968, with bird damage estimated at 25 million dollars, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Nuisance Bird Law. This law provided the basic legislation for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Commerce (VDAC) to allow its personnel to investigate complaints, conduct surveys, and initiate bird control programs when necessary. Administration of the law is by the Plant Pest Control Section of the VDAC along with a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service. This paper is intended to explain how the VDAC, now the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS), conducts its program, the problem bird species encountered, the control techniques employed, the unique bird problems in the State, and the acceptance of the program by the public