Corporate Governance Reform in a Time of Crisis‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION The financial and economic crisis that emerged in 2007 wrought havoc on banking systems around the world, and leading global financial centers in the United States and the united Kingdom were hardly spared. To the contrary, New York and London found themselves at the very heart of the crisis, their banks similarly crippled by extraordinary levels of debt and losses on complex mortgage-backed securities. In the wake of the crisis, both countries have engaged in wide-ranging regulatory efforts to contain the damage and prevent such a catastrophe from occurring again, and these efforts have included corporate governance reform proposals intended to curb risk-taking. on both sides of the Atlantic these proposals have sought to empower shareholders--not only in financial firms, but in all public companies--evidently in the belief that this would permit the shareholders to constrain reckless managers of banks and other types of entities in the future.