"Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theory of incomplete contracts to interpret the Basel Accords as a framework for continually renegotiating minimal duties and standards of safety-net management across the community of nations. Modelling the stakes and stakeholders represented by different regulators helps us to understand that inconsistencies exist in prior understandings about the range of sectoral effects that the 2004 Basel II agreement might produce. In the U.S., resolving these inconsistencies has complicated and markedly delayed Basel II's implementation"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.