The US Treasury is already hiring experts to help buy troubled assets from financial institutions, but the most important question behind the bail-out plan remains open: what is the right price for these assets since they are not actively traded?

In the past six months, three studies have been published on the declining role of the US in global capital markets. This decline is often blamed on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sox, passed in 2002). But the US share of the global market for initial public offerings has been falling since the late 1990s. Hence this decline could not have been primarily due to Sox.Instead it resulted from a mix of factors including improvements in non-US markets and the threat of ..read more