Document Type
Article
Publication Title
University of Chicago Law Review
Publication Date
3-2025
ISSN
0041-9494
Page Number
545
Keywords
treasury market, credit risk, central clearing
Disciplines
Banking and Finance Law | Law
Abstract
In October 1956, the famed U.S. architect Frank Lloyd Wright revealed a radical and ambitious new project. The Illinois would be a mile high, four times the height of the Empire State Building (at that point still the tallest building in the world). Key to this vision was a type of foundation known as the taproot, which offered a means by which to secure such a towering edifice while still enabling architectural creativity-or, as Wright put it, to "make rigidity possible at [ ] extreme heights." A similar design had previously protected another Wright design, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when virtually every other major building in the vicinity was leveled. It was, as Baron Kishichiro Okura declared at the time, "a monument of [his] genius." Even though Wright never ended up building the Illinois, his vision nevertheless has parallels in U.S. financial history. The market for Treasury securities represents its own kind of "taproot"-a deep and liquid market for risk-free debt that has anchored an ambitious and creative U.S. dollar economy, while also ensuring the safety and soundness of its financial and monetary system.
Recommended Citation
Yadav Yesha and Joshua Younger,
Central Clearing the U.S. Treasury Market, 92 University of Chicago Law Review. 545
(2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1647