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Equity prices called the crisis early and differentiated the sick from the sound. Market discipline worked. Had CoCos with market-based triggers been in place, the crisis may just have played out differently. Pre-emptive recapitalisation of failing institutions would have occurred, either due to automatic CoCo conversion or remedial action by managers under pressure from (potentially converting) debt- and (potentially diluting) shareholders. CoCos could have operated as a contractual prompt corrective action mechanism. This market-based contractual approach has the advantage of turning poacher into gamekeeper. It uses the risk-taking incentives embedded in equities to sharpen market discipline. A market problem is turned into a market solution. With less discretion and bankruptcy, these contracts would stand a greater chance of proving time-consistent in a crisis. Historically, that has been the hardest nut to crack. (c) Control rights A third set of potential structural solutions would be to address governance and control problems at source. Post-crisis, a number of proposals have already been put forward to strengthen bank governance. These include increasing board expertise and performance and upping the power of bank risk committees (Walker (2009), Basel (2010b), OECD (2010)). These are steps in the right direction. But looking down the star-studded cast of nonexecutive directors on the boards of failed financial institutions during the crisis, to wish for better is to wish upon a star. So what else might be done? In banking, the two prevailing ownership and control models are the public limited company and the mutually-owned co-operative.