BC Law’s Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor Patricia McCoy, a rare US legal academic specializing in both insurance law and federal banking regulation, has been selected by the Federal Reserve Board as an inaugural member of its Insurance Policy Advisory Committee (IPAC).
McCoy and the other 20 members of the IPAC will advise the Federal Reserve Board on a variety of domestic and international insurance issues. The appointees’ backgrounds range from actuarial science to academia to insurance regulation and policyholder advocacy.
“I am inspired by the IPAC’s mission and am deeply honored to be a member of the committee,” McCoy said of her appointment.
McCoy’s expertise crosses several boundaries, from insurance to banking regulation to insurance regulation to consumer financial protection.
McCoy came to BC Law in 2014 from her post as director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut. She currently teaches insurance law and banking regulation as well as an array of other financial services regulatory classes.
She developed banking regulation experience in the 1980s, when she litigated failed thrift cases during the S&L crisis. After entering academe in the 1990s, she published numerous works on bank holding company oversight and capital regulation.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, she wrote a series of publications, including the book, Subprime Virus, on federal regulation of insurance and the importance of consolidated oversight of insurance conglomerates. Presciently, in “A Tale of Three Markets: The Law and Economics of Predatory Lending” published in the Texas Law Review in 2002, McCoy was among the first to raise alarms about the dangers of subprime loans.
Dating to 2003, McCoy’s interest in consumer financial protection and service to underserved communities has taken numerous forms. She has served on the board of directors of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association and the Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Council. She was appointed to help form the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011, where she served as the first head of the bureau’s Mortgage Markets Section. In that capacity, she spearheaded the agency’s mortgage rulemakings under the Dodd-Frank Act.
McCoy recently concluded her term on the Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Rappaport Center for Law & Public Policy at BC Law. She has also testified before Congress and been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post and on National Public Radio.
Read the Federal Reserve Board announcement here.