Collateral Damage: The Impact of Mortgage Debt on U.S. Savings

This article contributes to the literature on saving by empirically investigating the determinants of the saving rate in the United States, with a special focus on the role of mortgage debt. Using data from 1987 to 2013, we find that mortgage payments have a substantial negative impact on both personal and private saving rates in the United States. An increase of 10 percentage points in mortgage payments leads to a 9.1-percentage-point drop in the personal saving rate and a 12.4-percentage-point drop in the private saving rate. In addition, including mortgage debt as an explanatory variable leads to significant changes in the impact of other variables, which further reinforces our claim that mortgage debt is important for the analysis of the saving rate. Comparing mortgage payments with nonmortgage consumer debt payments, we find that mortgage payments have a larger impact on the private saving rate whereas nonmortgage consumer debt payments have a larger impact on the personal saving rate. We also find a partial but robust crowding-out effect of public saving rate on the two saving rates. Our results have implications for monetary policy and government policies that encourage mortgage borrowing.     

集资诈骗罪的法理分析

对集资诈骗罪的犯罪客体,主体和行为方式进行分析.     

Regulating money laundering for terrorism financing: EU–US transnational policy networks and the financial action task force

Through increased cooperation transatlantic policy networks have been able to sharpen the tools used to combat the laundering of funds used for illicit ends including terrorism finance. After the attacks on 11 September 2001, rules were adopted on both sides of the Atlantic to restrict the flow of funds for terrorist purposes. This article captures some of the recent trends in cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the USA in addressing the issue of money laundering for terrorism finance. It goes further to assess how the EU engages with the financial action task force whose mandate was modified after 11 September 2001 to also cater for money that is laundered to fund terrorist activities.     

The new face of developing country debt

Developing country debt has been a major preoccupation for development policy makers and practitioners since the debt crisis of 1982. It is a major obstacle to economic and social progress in developing countries. After the resolution of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the debt relief initiatives for low-income countries of 1997–2006 concerns about developing country debt seem to have receded. However, there are a growing number of problems that warrant concern, including the accumulation of domestic debt, short-term debt and private non-guaranteed debt, and increasing recourse by low-income countries to international capital markets. At the same time developing countries have strengthened their capacity to oversee and analyse their debt portfolios. Nonetheless, significant weaknesses remain in debt management capacity at the national level. Moreover, the activities of ‘vulture funds’ and the lack of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism reveal major shortcomings in the international institutional architecture that need to be addressed urgently.     

合同债权与仲裁条款转让的再审视——基于实体法、程序法和冲突法的视角

合同转让时,尤其是合同权利转让时仲裁条款是否随之转让的问题,是近年来国际商事仲裁领域的一个重要话题。目前,国内理论界的主流观点以及司法实践支持仲裁条款自动转让。但仲裁条款自动转让的理论依据并不充分,也未解决所有问题,而且对于仲裁条款转让的论证仅仅限于国内法上的视角,并未考虑国际合同转让中仲裁条款的效力和相关的法律冲突与法律适用等问题。本文旨在从实体法、程序法和冲突法的多维角度,进一步探讨合同仲裁条款转让的理论和实践问题,并对当前国内外的立法与实践进行评判,以期进一步完善我国国内的法制和实践。     

集资诈骗罪“非法占有目的”要件的理论修正与司法检视

传统非法占有目的理论难以对集资诈骗罪中反复的"借款-还款"行为予以精准定性。"排除意思"既不是诈骗罪主观层面的要素,也无法适用于持续还本付息的集资诈骗行为。"利用意思"和"不法获利"不能用以区分集资诈骗罪与非法吸收公众存款罪,无法发挥"非法占有目的"应有的罪名界分功能。非法占有目的并非集资诈骗罪的独立构成要件,以集资诈骗故意统摄本罪的主观要件并规范化解释为财产损害故意,能够完整地发挥定罪和罪名区分功能。以不具有债务履行能力和意愿推定财产损害故意,不仅符合理论逻辑,也能够通过司法实践的检验。     

信托业经营的法律定位与公平竞争

按照我国现行的金融法律框架,金融业实行的是分业经营、分业管理,信托业享有完全独立于银行、证券和保险业的业务专营权。但是,这种专营权逐渐被各种部门规章以＂委托理财＂之名打破,使非信托业事实上都享有了经营信托的权利,再加之信托业自身能力的限制,必然出现业务经营的困境,甚至不得不事实上违规经营。＂委托理财＂实质上是一种非纯粹信托或称准信托,是对现行法律的有意规避,是造成信托业困境和不公平竞争的主要根源。因此,必须明确信托的认定标准,给信托业经营一个合理的法律定位,实现银行业、信托业、证券业、保险业之间基本公平的竞争。     

Losing out on substance but winning procedurally? The European Parliament and accountability in crisis legislation

Recent studies have found that the European Parliament (EP) had limited substantive influence on the European Union’s response to the European debt crisis. It has been argued that Parliament compensated this loss by expanding its oversight powers over executive bodies in the implementation of crisis legislation. This article systematically assesses the conditions under which the EP has been successful in increasing its account-holding powers, using new data on the accountability provisions included in economic and financial legislation put forward between 2009 and 2014. It is found that Parliament has indeed been more likely to gain oversight powers in crisis legislation. Levels of accountability are also higher in package deals and more salient legislation. The findings here provide a more nuanced picture of Parliament’s inter-institutional gains and losses in recent years and give more insight into the EP’s account-holding role.     

Competitive partners in development financing: China and Japan expanding overseas infrastructure investment

Abstract

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, with the world in search for new economic engines, China and Japan have explicitly given their answer through their expansion of overseas infrastructure investments. This study focuses on the flagship sector of high-speed railways (HSR) and examines what kinds of development financing China and Japan have adopted in making these investments. It asks the following questions: What similarities are there in the Chinese and Japanese approaches to investments in overseas infrastructure, and how do they differ from traditional Western development financing? Also, in what ways have China and Japan changed their approaches to overseas infrastructure projects during this process? It argues that in the process of expanding overseas infrastructure investments and competing for infrastructure projects, China and Japan have become ‘competitive partners’ in challenging the traditional norms of development financing represented by the Washington Consensus and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC). To be more specific, China and Japan have adopted each other’s practices of tied commercial financing, heavy government involvement, focusing on physical infrastructure and industrialization, and showing respect for host-country forms of governance. In particular, by joining China in the new game of exporting infrastructure and through its own ‘quality infrastructure investment’ initiative, Japan has broken out of the constraints of DAC norms as an aid donor and endorsed some fundamental Chinese approaches to development and development cooperation, which in their turn were inspired by earlier Japanese practices.     

Indebted life and money culture: payday lending in the United Kingdom

Critical social scientific research holds that credit–debt is a principal economic and governing relation in contemporary economy and society, but largely neglects money’s role in indebted life. Drawing on qualitative research in the payday loan market in the United Kingdom, the paper shows that borrowers typically relate to loans in monetary rather than financial terms and incorporate them into practices of payment, spending and online banking. To analyse how indebted life is variously experienced and enacted through money, the concept of money culture is developed to refer to money’s culture, money’s meanings and money’s affects. Borrowers enter into and negotiate payday loans through a digitally mediated money culture that both mobilizes and runs counter to money’s powerful fictions as circulating universal equivalent and calculative means of account.